‘Ancestral Beasts’ explores family trauma, mental health and the path to healing

by Chevi Rabbit, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

(ANNews) – Métis filmmaker Tim Riedel’s feature film Ancestral Beasts had its Edmonton premiere at Metro Cinema on October 18, serving as the closing-night film of NorthwestFEARFest. Riedel, who wrote, directed and produced the psychological horror film, drew on personal experiences and research to explore mental health, intergenerational trauma, stigma and the complicated relationships that can develop within families.

With a background in documentary filmmaking, Riedel had spent years examining difficult subjects around the world. But a challenge from an Elder encouraged him to turn his attention toward a more personal story: his relationship with his late mother. Born and raised in Winnipeg and surrounding rural communities, Riedel had also lived in the Toronto area for 16 years with his wife and children at the time of the interview.

“So my background is in documentaries. I did a lot of documentaries for a long time, and I was challenged by an elder.” His earlier documentary work included subjects such as exploitation, sex tourism and child exploitation in Southeast Asia.

“I never really thought that my personal stories mattered. I put myself at the end, at the very, very bottom of the list of priorities…But, you know, when an elder tells you something, you gotta listen.” Riedel recalled that his mother had encouraged him to tell her story one day, although he had not fully appreciated the significance of her words at the time. “But one thing my mom always told me was, ‘maybe one day you’ll tell my story.’ But back then, I didn’t take her seriously.”

Turning Personal Trauma into Horror

Riedel said his relationship with his mother was shaped by love, but also by the trauma she experienced as a Sixties Scoop survivor and in different foster homes. He said she developed a personality disorder that was not diagnosed until later in life. “I loved her. We had a very close relationship in some ways. But we had a different dynamic because my mom was a Sixties Scoop kid, and later in life, because of the trauma she endured in different foster homes and stuff. That’s pretty brutal. She developed a personality disorder but wasn’t diagnosed until later in life.”

Riedel said that, as a child, he did not have the language or understanding to recognize what his mother was experiencing. “I didn’t understand as a kid because there was no term for the Sixties Scoop and borderline personality back then and all those notions.”

He recalled how he and his siblings had become desensitized to the instability in their household. “Frankly, when my mom used to get really upset with stuff, I would kind of just downplay it because we were so desensitized to the chaos and instability in our house. We didn’t have the compassion that somebody else should have had.”

His mother died about six years before the interview. As Riedel learned more about her experiences, he began to understand their relationship differently and look back on her life with greater compassion and empathy. He came to recognize that her suffering had affected her as well as the rest of the family. “The more I learned about what she experienced, the more I realized, oh, this was something that was, like, attacking her and hurting her…It wasn’t just happening to us – my siblings and me. It was happening to her worse,” referring to his mother’s mental illness.

Riedel said this shift in perspective helped him distinguish his mother from the mental health disorder she experienced. “And from there I could see that, oh, you were a victim. It wasn’t, like, you doing this to us. It was you and us on one side and this thing on the other side coming to get us.” That understanding became central to the metaphor behind Ancestral Beasts: a creature that begins as a protector but becomes destructive through its own dysregulation.

Riedel said a conventional documentary would not have conveyed the emotional experience he wanted audiences to understand. “So, I couldn’t tell that story in a documentary… I want to reach people emotionally. I want people to feel a little bit of what it felt like to be in that house, and potentially what it might have felt like to be my mom, struggling with that.” The result was a psychological horror film in which a grotesque, centipede-like creature stalks Elyse, feeding on emotional turmoil.

“But in the end, what it actually ends up being is that it doesn’t hate you and it’s not this monster trying to kill you. It’s this thing that actually loves you and is trying to protect you, but it’s so dysregulated because of what it’s endured that it can’t see a threat from something that’s safe.” Riedel said the creature’s attempts to protect could instead cause harm, affecting both the person experiencing distress and those around them. “It even hurts Elyse, the main character, at certain points, but it’s not out to do harm. It’s out of protection.”

A Story Grounded in Research and Indigenous Knowledge

Although the film uses supernatural horror to explore its themes, Riedel said his approach to researching the story remained rooted in documentary practices. “The film is, in my view, still very much a documentary because I took a documentary approach in the research of it.” He said he consulted Indigenous knowledge keepers and people with expertise in trauma-informed responses, psychology, psychotherapy and harm reduction.

“I don’t own the exclusive right to Indigenous intergenerational trauma or the struggles that we all have fighting stigma to find healing.” Riedel explained that these consultations helped shape the film’s portrayal of stigma, including the ways people can internalize negative beliefs about themselves or encounter barriers within institutions and society.

“In Canada, I engaged with knowledge keepers and subject matter experts from Indigenous communities to help inform this and lay out the portrayal of this story, and what the different interactions in society look like when you’re facing stigma, either self-stigma, which is the biggest thing, where, you know, you hold it against yourself, or systemic stigma, where certain institutions are built in a way that are incongruent with delivering the results that they should be doing.”

He also described the isolation that can result when people are treated as though their mental health struggles define them. “…they just think you’re crazy and want to back off and have nothing to do with you, and that’s very dehumanizing and isolating.”

Elyse and Nikki: Two Responses to Family Trauma

The film follows Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom), a young Métis woman who cuts ties with her older sister, Nikki (Darla Contois), and retreats to her ancestral home in the countryside. Although the sisters share a history of family trauma, Riedel said they respond to it differently. Elyse begins to recognize the need to take responsibility for her present actions, while Nikki struggles to accept that responsibility.

“Where they differ is that Elyse is willing to start to become accountable for the trouble in her life that’s happening now. Does it mean that she’s saying that it was her fault that she had this trauma passed on to her? It wasn’t her fault, but she is acknowledging that she needs to be responsible for what she does from today on and lets it affect other people and affect her current well-being.”

Riedel said Nikki remained reluctant to accept responsibility for her own choices. “Whereas Nikki is still in a position where she doesn’t want to believe any of that is her responsibility. She’d rather blame other people, like her little sister, or the pain and suffering she has in her life.”

Riedel said the difference between the sisters becomes especially significant when one begins to heal while the other remains caught in the same patterns. “Because once she becomes accountable for it, that’s when the hard work really starts, and Nikki doesn’t want to do that, whereas Elyse does.”

He said the dynamic could be difficult when one person begins to move forward while leaving the other behind in a codependent relationship. “The challenges in these relationships, and we all have them in our families to one degree or another, the challenge is when one gets better, truly gets better, and leaves the other one in the codependent relationship that those two sisters had. Where does that leave the sister that’s left behind?”

Riedel said Nikki was then left to confront her own struggles while continuing to resist Elyse’s decision to move forward. “It means that now she has nobody to blame but herself. And she’s forced to face these things, but she’s alone. And because she absolutely refuses to help and tries everything she possibly can to get her sister to come back.”

He added that the characters’ actions could not be reduced to a simple distinction between right and wrong. “In some ways, it’s not 100% wrong. All these characters are complex that way. Nobody’s 100% wrong, nobody’s 100% right.”

Riedel said Nikki’s difficulty accepting Elyse’s decision to move forward illustrates how challenging it can be when someone begins to leave a codependent relationship. While Nikki may believe she is trying to protect her sister, respecting boundaries also means accepting when someone needs space.

Supporting Others While Maintaining Boundaries

Riedel hoped audiences would consider how they respond to family members experiencing mental health challenges. He said the film was intended to encourage compassion without asking people to ignore their own safety or boundaries.

“If you’re a person who has a family member that you recognize, maybe you yourself don’t recognize Elyse in yourself, but you recognize her or Nikki in a family member. I hope they take away from the film that there’s a way to be supportive and not resentful, not fearful…You can be supportive in a way while maintaining healthy boundaries that protect you and still support the person who you want to support.”

Riedel pointed to Cody (Asivak Koostachin) as an example of someone whose desire to help Elyse becomes harmful when he disregards her boundaries. “Cody is a prime example of misplaced altruism. He wants so badly to help, for reasons the character has off screen. He wants to help Elyse so much that he puts himself in harm’s way. He doesn’t respect her boundaries, and he’s unaware of his own and he gets harmed from it.”

By contrast, Elyse’s cousin Shayla (Shannon Baker) represents a different approach to support. Riedel said she wants to help but recognizes when she needs to step back. “Shayla, the cousin, wants to be there to support, but realizes when, okay, I’ve got to back off because this is no longer safe for me.”

Riedel imagined Shayla eventually becoming a bridge toward forgiveness as Elyse continued her healing journey. “And ideally, if there was ever a sequel, like further down the road of this story, Shayla would reapproach Elyse and be the first bridge to forgiveness and maybe who Elyse is now that she is on the pathway towards healing.”

Leaving Room for the Audience

Riedel deliberately left some questions unanswered so viewers could interpret the film through their own experiences. “I only give about 70% of the answers in the movie and let the movie be a mirror to the audience.” He said explicitly identifying every character’s mental health condition, Indigenous background or sexual orientation could limit the ways audiences connected with the story.

“If I named borderline personality disorder, or if I named all the specific indigenous groups that the different characters came from, or if I named any of that. If I gave sexual orientation to any of the characters, that kind of stuff. I’d feel distracted from making the story personal for every individual viewer.”

He said viewers might see the creature as representing addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder or another personal struggle. “Because maybe to them it’s an addiction, not borderline personality disorder with the creature. Or maybe it’s PTSD in a different form that manifests in a different form.”

The film’s structure also supports this ambiguity. Riedel described the first half as more grounded in real-life struggles, while the second half moves toward the supernatural to convey what those struggles can feel like internally.

“The first half of the movie is very much like real-life horror, and then the second half of the movie is very much supernatural. So first we feed intellectually, kind of like a documentary, and then the second half feels like now on the inside.”

Healing and Accountability Beyond the Ending

When asked what he hoped audiences would take away from Elyse’s journey, Riedel said the film’s meaning would be personal to each viewer. For those who recognized themselves in the character, he wanted the story to show that steps toward healing were possible. “But what I do want, for answers, if you see yourself in the main character, like Elyse, I want you to take away that there are steps towards finding healing.”

Riedel spoke about his own experience of finding a doctor who helped point him in the right direction, while acknowledging that healing could take different forms for different people. “It might not be the same as the one Elyse took by talking to a doctor in a clinic. You know, that works sometimes. It worked for me, thank goodness. I stumbled onto a really, really good doctor in a walk-in clinic; for me, that started pointing me in the right direction. But, you know, they may not find that. They might find healing in other ways, and the point is to not give up. It’s to keep finding, keep seeking healing.”

He also emphasized the importance of taking an active role in recovery. “Also, the other takeaway is that it’s a hard reality of nobody’s coming to save you but you in the end. You’re the one who has to go and keep being responsible for your healing. You’re not going to sit there and have the healing find you. You got to be responsible.”

Riedel said he imagined Elyse learning to manage the creature rather than simply trying to destroy it, while continuing to face the consequences of her past actions and the judgments of others. “Her journey, unfortunately, isn’t perfect because we always have to live with the consequences of our previous actions, even if they came from a place where we were hurting and not making the best decisions. Unfortunately, there’s a long tail of those things that follow us, and I think that’s an important story to tell in one way or another.”

For Riedel, the story extended beyond mental health to the challenge of moving forward when others continued to define someone by their past. He hoped the film would encourage conversations about trauma, stigma, compassion and the importance of supporting others while maintaining healthy boundaries.