Tim Riedel talks ‘Ancestral Beasts’ and Indigenous horror

JoySauce spoke to Riedel for the film’s 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival world premiere to discuss how confronting his past started a new chapter in his filmmaking, and creating a female-centered story about healing, anger, and toxic family dynamics.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Carolyn Hinds: I think that first features say a lot about who a filmmaker is, so what was it about Ancestral Beasts that made it the story you wanted to debut with and why now?
Tim Reidel: The story that I was compelled to tell came from me traveling all over the world doing documentaries for years and years, running away from my stories and my past for various reasons, and focusing on telling other people’s stories. Then I was at an assembly, and one of my elders came to me and said, “You know, you go all over the world telling other people’s stories, but when are you going to tell our stories? Tell your story?” And when an elder in my community says something like that, you have to deeply consider it. 

My mom had passed away recently at that time, and she had always said, “Maybe one day you’ll tell my story.” And I’m sure she didn’t think it would be a horror film, [Laughs], but a psychological horror was the proper genre. 

I wanted people to understand the difficulty of suffering from a severe mental health disorder, and really fighting for healing. I’m well aware that many horror films deal in trauma. This story, on the surface, might look like that, but it’s really about healing and what are the obstacles in place to prevent us from finding that healing. Who’s putting those obstacles in the way, and who’s helping us overcome them, and at what cost?

CH: You were running from telling the history of the atrocities committed against your own people here in Canada, but were still compelled to tell those types of stories even if in different countries like Rwanda and Myanmar. Why do you think that is?
TR: Oh, it’s completely connected! I didn’t know how to face my own, the genocides in Canada, and what’s happened to my people and the broader Indigenous people in Canada. I didn’t know how to address that earlier on. There was still a lot of pain and shame, and it was very complicated. But I still had the desire to have that story told, and it was very important not to have that story told on my terms. But to be a vessel, and that’s a really cheesy way to say it.

I call myself a cultural translator, where I would go with a very small team from Canada and we’d collaborate with people on the ground from the villages that we’re portraying so that they weren’t only in front of the camera, but they’re also represented behind it as well so they could tell their own story. 

So I found a lot of catharsis in telling those stories, and a measure of healing. It definitely made me stronger and braver to tell my own, and it was also incredibly humbling, too. Those experiences helped get me more formed, so that when the push for me to face my own history, my people’s history, and my family’s history (happened), I was operating from a much better place where I could listen to myself and tell the truth about myself and not bury it deep down anymore.

CH: Something many don’t understand about depression is that it doesn’t just present as sadness or lethargy and fatigue, anger can be a sign, too. People can be filled with anger and not know and understand why, and we see it in Elyse. She’s angry. Speak a bit about representing her depression this way.
TR: Well it’s autobiographical. It’s both a reflection of my life and people very close to me. One of the biggest social stigmas I find, is that when a person is angry and upset because they’re dysregulated, it’s a bigger anger and reaction than what common people would think is appropriate for the situation. It makes people walk back, and undermines the value of what they’re actually angry about.

I wanted to depict that in the film, and to be fair to the situation I had to show her being angry at things that weren’t justified because her particular disorder that I was portraying, it comes from a place that when you’re very young, if you don’t have the people protecting you that you need to protect you, you create this inner protector. And we all do it to one degree or another, but with this particular disorder, her trauma was so severe that her protector was dysregulated and she couldn’t control it. 

She sees many things as a slight or an offense that maybe aren’t. Sees things as threats that maybe aren’t. They’re annoyances or inconveniences, but she sees something and misunderstands it. What a beautiful genre horror is to have that complicated depiction of that mental health disorder. 

I really have to give it to Morgan Holmstrom who depicted that with such incredible sensitivity, and always having it just perfectly calibrated because it could easily become a cartoonish portrayal. It’s brave to go as far as she went with the anger and make it believable.

CH: One of the main aspects of the film is that it centers on female relationships and for Elyse and her older sister Nikki, played by Darla Contois, their dynamic is more than that of typical siblings, it’s very toxic and symbiotic, which is connected to what the creature is. So talk about how that works with them because Nikki herself doesn’t realize how she harms Elyse.
TR: Nikki believes that she’s the hero. That she’s just trying to get her little sister home for Christmas, and trying to do it by any means necessary. In her mind, in her version of the story, Nikki really believes that she’s “the good big sister,” but what she doesn’t realize, and this is what I love about all of the characters, they’re hiding something from themselves that they don’t understand because they don’t want to face it, and what Nikki is hiding from is that she comes from the same messed up place that Elyse does. 

But it’s easier for her not to focus on her own problems and focus on her sister’s and make her the place for accountability for why things happen in their lives and they have struggles. 

So when Elyse leaves, where does that leave Nikki? Nikki doesn’t have a person to point to and say, “You’re the reason for all of my problems because you’re screwed up!” And if Elyse gets better and finds health and wellness, then Nikki’s completely alone in the world, and that’s probably her biggest fear—being abandoned and being the only messed up one in the family now. It’s one of the “crabs in a barrel” scenarios. She has to pull her sister back down so they can be the same.

CH: I have to give kudos to Darla and Morgan for their scenes together because Darla plays Nikki in a way that she’s angry, and a bit sinister and mean at times, but with an air of naivete where she genuinely seems to not understand why Elyse is upset with her.
TR: Darla is such a great writer in her own right and could easily be a director, and she pushed a lot for how Nikki is represented and her dialogue. If there was something that didn’t make sense to Darla, it wasn’t happening. We were fixing it, so she’s really good for that.

When I saw Darla in Little Bird, which she won the Canadian Screen Award for in 2024, I thought, “How interesting.” I could totally see her embodying the Nikki character, which you wouldn’t think seeing her in Little Bird, but I could see what kind of incredible actor she was. We grew up in similar places in and around Winnipeg and rural Manitoba. I didn’t know her personally, but I had a feel for what she may have experienced and survival skills she developed in her personal life, so Nikki has these incredible survival skills that Darla I imagine, pulled from her own life and just dialed it up to ten. Nikki walks into a room and within a millisecond knows how to get what she wants from every single person. I wouldn’t say she’s sophisticated with it, you know, she's like a blunt force trauma object, but she gets results that satisfy her.

CH: Trauma is perceived subjectively and objectively because even when experiencing the same event and history, people tend to want to minimize the feelings of others as a way to ignore the pain still affecting them, and I think Ancestral Beasts has that.
TR: Yeah, that’s definitely a fair way to see it. When I think filmmakers do it the best way, is when they don’t cheat the audience, too. They put in the work so the audience has enough information to make up their own mind. They don’t leave blanks for the sake of leaving blanks, and I tried really hard not to do that with this film, like the scenes we talked about with Darla where she’s playing it both ways simultaneously, there’s a lot of that. 

One person sees it one way and it’s 100 percent right, and the other sees it another way and they’re 100 percent right. Where some films fall short, I find, is when they make things ambiguous and haven’t done the work to earn the ambiguity, so I’m glad that it worked with you.