Horror Born From Inheritance

Read Time:5 Minute, 26 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Ancestral Beasts
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Genre: Psychological Horror, Indigenous Horror, Haunted House
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 41m
Director: Tim Riedel
Writer: Tim Riedel
Cast: Morgan Holmstrom, Darla Contois, Gail Maurice, Asivak Koostachin, Shannon Baker, Josh Strait, Jess Salgueiro
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: The depths of horror understand that the past doesn’t stay buried just because a family stops talking about it. Sometimes it waits in a room nobody enters. Sometimes it shapes the way people love, fight, collapse, and survive. In ANCESTRAL BEASTS, that inheritance doesn’t remain abstract. It crawls into the open.

Tim Riedel’s psychological horror feature follows Elyse, a Red River Métis woman trying to rebuild herself after cutting ties with her toxic sister and retreating to a rural ancestral home. The move is supposed to offer distance, quiet, and the possibility of recovery. Instead, it becomes a confrontation with something older than one bad relationship. A monstrous creature begins stalking her, feeding on her emotions and turning buried trauma into a physical threat.

That could easily become heavy-handed in the wrong hands. Mental illness as a monster is one of horror’s riskier takes because it can either invite empathy or flatten a person into symptoms. ANCESTRAL BEASTS is built around avoiding that trap. Riedel’s background matters here, not as a trivia point, but as part of the film’s reason for existing. The story draws from personal and cultural history, including the legacy of the Sixties Scoop and the long-term damage caused when Indigenous children were taken from their families, communities, and identities.

The creature never feels like a metaphor superimposed on a haunted-house movie. It sounds like the house, the family history, the body, and the mind are all part of the same wound. The horror isn’t only that something is watching Elyse from the shadows. It’s that the thing watching her understands exactly where she’s weakest because it was born from what she inherited.

Morgan Holmstrom gives the project an emotionally demanding center as Elyse. The role asks for more than fear. It needs exhaustion, wariness, anger, guilt, and the uneasy hope of someone who wants to heal but doesn’t yet trust peace when it arrives. Darla Contois, Gail Maurice, and Asivak Koostachin add to an Indigenous-led ensemble that seems designed to keep the story from narrowing into one woman’s isolated breakdown. This is personal horror, but it isn’t private horror. It belongs to family, memory, community, and the long reach of what previous generations were forced to endure.

The home also gives ANCESTRAL BEASTS a strong genre framing. Haunted house stories work best when the house feels less like real estate and more like a witness. Here, the home becomes more than a place to recover. It’s a physical archive. Every room carries the possibility of memory. Every sound suggests something underneath the world. The film moves between psychological anxiety and creature horror without treating either as separate.

The monster is the element that could make or break the film. When trauma is given a literal body, the design has to feel specific. Too polished and it risks becoming generic. Too symbolic and it can turn stiff. The version of this creature is something unpleasantly intimate, less like a demon and more like a parasite that knows the family history better than the family does. There’s the suggestion of body horror, infestation, and spiritual violation, which gives Riedel room to create fear that feels both external and internal.

There’s also something about the film’s decision to connect healing and horror rather than treat them as opposites. A lot of trauma-centered genre stories use pain as atmosphere, then call that depth. ANCESTRAL BEASTS seems more interested in the work of facing what survival has cost. Elyse isn’t simply running from a monster. She’s being forced to confront the emotional systems that allowed the monster to feed in the first place.

Riedel’s documentary background may be one of the film’s biggest advantages. A filmmaker used to handling sensitive subjects with real-world stakes is likely to approach this material with more care than a director treating Indigenous trauma as horror vibes. The development process, which involved Elders, Knowledge Keepers, trauma-informed experts, and academics, gives us a film that earns its emotional authority rather than simply borrowing pain for impact.

The SKINAMARINK connection through executive producer Edmon Rotea will likely be part of the marketing conversation, but ANCESTRAL BEASTS offers an entirely different kind of fear. SKINAMARINK worked through childhood nightmares and domestic disorientation. ANCESTRAL BEASTS is more direct in its character focus, using the haunted-house and creature-feature tools to explore family fracture, mental health, grief, and cultural inheritance.

ANCESTRAL BEASTS is the kind of debut that gives a filmmaker a clear point of view. It has the ingredients for something more meaningful than a haunted-house exercise. A lead character carrying pain she didn’t cause, alone; a creature that turns emotional damage into a bodily threat; and a home that may offer answers only after it stops pretending to be safe.

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[photo courtesy of MICHIF KOONTEUR, BUFFALO GAL PICTURES, KISTIKAN PICTURES]

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