Bestias: A Horror Built on Dread

V.R. Rao’s Bestias follows a woman through the woods running from a beast that is neither bear nor man. On a hiking trip with her son, she finds time and space imploding around her, becomes trapped in a maze of some terrible will, and the last remaining certainties of her life threaten to fall apart.

The beast is stalking Jess (La Rivers). It appears and disappears, as if showing it has all the time and patience to play with his prey. Its claw marks scorches the trees, the ground, anything that has a solid surface. Jess, on the other hand, is additionally haunted by a loss of reality. Objects, like her son’s (Ta’j) arm, which look real and tangible, reveal themselves changed without warning.

Jess navigates this landscape half running, half acting like nothing is out of the ordinary. Her pragmatic manner with her son belies the terrors, there is the hope perhaps that if she acts normal, she can restore normalcy. But it is also unsettling for the audience to have her—a figure of authority as both parent and protagonist—switch back and forth, their own kind of shift from reality to unreality.

The prowling beast is a VFX creation who is the creepier for its rough-hewn make—an unnatural thing that does not belong to the forest, existing to torment just one person, a malevolence with a single purpose. At one point it is even separated by time as its eyes look like they belong to a demon from medieval art. This creepy quality is the film’s defining feature, successfully coaxing it out with simple setups like living room furniture in the middle of the forest. Cold, wet, unprotected, in every way wrong and yet there, oblivious.

By constraining itself to dread instead of outright horror, Bestias makes itself more difficult to shake off. Besides, its seven-minute runtime does not afford its audience the scope to simplify and domesticate the unease it sets loose. There is the fragile reassurance of a closure, but the suspicion remains. Was everything really okay?

Watch Bestias Short Film