A look at the ‘dark places’ of mental illness

Taking a few steps away from a ramshackle-looking house in the woods, filmmaker Tim Riedel is happy to discuss the horror film he wrote and is currently directing.

For the sake of everyone’s comfort, it helps the house is actually tucked away from the wintry elements within the brick walls of McGee Street Studios in the West End.

The home’s intricately grungy look is mostly artifice, right down to the spots of rust on an antique iron bed frame. But the movie in production, Ancestral Beasts, is rooted in a personal reality for Riedel, a Red River Métis born in Winnipeg and based in Toronto.

The house is a central part of the story in which a woman named Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) attempts to find some grounding in her ancestral home after escaping a toxic relationship with her sister.

Instead, she discovers the house holds a sinister supernatural presence that threatens all she holds dear.

In a room just beyond the house set, Riedel admits his film career thus far has been very much rooted in documentary reality, with credits on Canmore: 72 Hours in a State of Emergency (2013) and the 2024 doc These Four Walls, telling the backstory of a lawsuit launched against the Manitoba Developmental Centre.

For all of Ancestral Beast’s spooky elements, “I don’t see it as a horror film,” Riedel says. “I see it as a documentary, really. My approach is very much a documentary that analyzes the different types of stigma that a person has to face as they’re struggling with a severe mental health disorder.”

He says the story is based on his own experience with his late mother, whom he says was afflicted with a “severe personality disorder.” In constructing the film, Riedel had to confront his own past, which he says often felt as if there were an unpredictable creature lurking in the shadows of his home.

“Now, back in the day when I was younger, I just think this was my mom doing this to us, to the house, and I had a lot of resentment towards her for that. But after she passed away and I wanted to try to get over that resentment, I realized that I could separate her disorder from her,” he says. “And it became this whole separate entity that I saw was attacking her just as much as it was attacking us.

“So when you think of a severe personality disorder as a creature lurking in the shadows, eager to attack, and that’s the cause of all the chaos and instability in the home for everybody, well, that’s a horror film.”

Luckily, Riedel could lean on longtime childhood friends for backup. The crew includes Ray Pereux as Riedel’s assistant and Joey Forte as cinematographer.

“We all grew up together,” Riedel says. “These guys kind of saved my life when I was about 15 years old.”

The director admits he could easily have become a street kid, lured into a life of selling drugs and doing break-and-enters.

“But Ray and Joey both came from such stable households and they let me like sleep over whenever I wanted,” Riedel says. “When things were getting too rough at home. I could sleep over at their house. I’m quite loyal to these guys.”

That loyalty extends to the film’s local producer, Fawnda Neckoway, founder of Nikâwiy Productions, who says she and Riedel first met when she was workshopping her short doc Language Keepers and Riedel was workshopping an early iteration of Ancestral Beasts.

“One of the things that I think really drew me to Tim’s story was the fact that it was from Winnipeg, and he’s from Winnipeg, and he felt it was important to bring the story back home and shoot here as much as possible with our community,” she says.

“There was an authenticity there. I think he’s doing a really vulnerable thing with how he’s sharing it.”

A narrative film set within a Métis community is a relative rarity (an exception is Gail Maurice’s recent film Blood Lines, which premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival in September). That means a portrayal of that community had to be handled with some delicacy.

Morgan Holmstrom (SkyMed), the Métis/Filipina actress who plays Elyse, says she did her best to handle the role accordingly.

“It goes to my understanding that this world goes to dark places, quite literally,” Holmstrom says. “And I just want to make sure I’m bringing that to life in the best way that I can.”

In that, she and the cast — which includes Jess Salguiero (Workin’ Moms) and Darla Contois (Little Bird) — and crew had the help of Métis elder Shirley Langan, who was brought on board to help navigate some of the real-world issues addressed in the film (and, Riedel says, provide “some of the world’s best hugs.”)

“The storyline involves our culture that is really, really deep within our hearts,” Langan says. “The spirit coming to life through this movie has to do with our communities, the terror that happens within our families, our lives, the challenges, the poverty, the residential schools, the welfare system.

“So Tim also called me, and I feel very blessed and very honoured. My role here is to spend time speaking with and touching base with each and every one of the crew that are here.”

Ancestral Beasts is scheduled to wrap Friday.

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