The lead performances are superlative, though: Rueda makes for a suitably pouty parental figure, eyes boring holes in everyone she meets through a face half-scarred by burns. But Zaitegi is a revelation, a beautifully cherubic figure who carries the pathos of her impending loss with unenviable pain. There’s a desperation to her behavior surrounding a dying parent that echoes J.A. Bayona’s deeply slept-on “A Monster Calls,” though its emotional highs don’t quite reach those peaks.
A less effective brush with the supernatural comes with Alexander J. Farrell’s “The Beast Within,” a too-hazy-by-half childhood fable about a young girl named Willow (Caoilinn Springall) glimpsing the collapse of her family through innocent eyes. She lives out in the English countryside with her mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) and father Noah (Kit Harington), while her grandfather (James Cosmo) watches on coolly on occasion. Willow is afflicted with an unnamed illness that requires an oxygen tank, which leaves her to witness the dissolution of her parents’ relationship through the hazy windows of their ornate country estate. Every so often, Noah’s facade of kindness gives way to bursts of aggression; every few nights, she sees her parents drive him away or search for him in the woods. One night, she dares to follow them and sees the truth: Noah is a werewolf, and his disease is tearing their family apart.
Farrell’s approach is almost too dreamlike, and some of the more interesting aspects of the film’s central metaphor (e.g., the lycanthrope-as-alcoholic-father) get lost in all the subjective haze. (He cut his fangs as a documentarian, which maybe explains the doubling-down on atmosphere over narrative.) The fairy tale trappings are exquisitely clear, with its patient shots of characters gazing wordlessly at each other, the camera offering a child’ s-eye view of all the moodily lit forests and crumbled stone edifices. But its charms wear off quickly, especially in a lilting second act that’s a bit too patient in exploring the dynamics we’ve long since established. Its creature-feature bona fides are clear, including some suitably visceral transformation effects that flash so quickly in the moonlit night they barely register. But apart from its domestic-drama angle, “The Beast Within” offers little to spice up its folkloric origins.
And now for something a little sunnier: A slight, but charming coming-of-age story about a little girl and the bottle of rice wine who gives her orders from space. I’m talking, of course, about Kim Da-min’s exceedingly heartwarming “FAQ,” a thumb in the eye to cram-school culture with a sci-fi spin. When we first meet young Dong-chun (Park Na-eun), she’s already at her intellectual and emotional limit: her parents slam her into one after-school program after another, trying to prep her for the high-stakes world of adulthood with a barrage of math, science, and foreign language classes. (Her interventions even go so far as to seeking medical intervention to make her taller.) Trouble is, all this pressure taking its toll on the poor girl — she’s got crippling stage fright, and she barely has any friends at school. Her only comfort, it seems, are a pair of fuzzy children’s-show creatures who give her advice in a kind of Windows 95-desktop background mind-palace (a very charming detail).
