Fiftysomething French couple Antoine and his wife Olga move to Galicia looking for a fresh start. Instead, they find only hostility and hardship in Rodrigo Sorogoyens The Beasts, a deeply uncomfortable portrait of everyday evil thats all the more terrifying for being true not the two main characters, who are fictional, but the conflict that comes to define their new life in that wild corner of northwest Spain.
Antoine (played by Denis Mnochet, a sturdy bear-like man with a James Gandolfini-esque screen presence) buys a modest plot on a primeval slope, fixing up the crumbling stone cottage into something cozy enough to call home. He and Olga (Marina Fos, who is billed first, but takes her time to emerge as the films main character) are fully prepared to face the challenges of raising crops on such unforgiving soil.
What theyre not prepared for is the open resentment of their xenophobic neighbors, 52-year-old Xan (Luis Zahera) and his brother, Loren (Diego Anido), who was kicked in the head by a horse at some point and has the jagged scar and blank stare to show for it. These two have lived in the same spot all their lives and dont take kindly to outsiders coming in and changing things. Or not changing them, as the case may be, since Antoine casts a deciding vote that prevents wind turbines from being installed, blocking the poor brothers from an easy payday.
The movie opens with slow-motion footage of a local tradition, called A rapa das bestas, in which rugged men grapple with wild horses, wrestling them long enough to trim their manes before turning the animals loose again. Its an evocative ritual, representing the brute struggle between species a metaphor that informs all that follows. Sorogoyen is constantly reminding audiences of the relationship between man and animal in the movie, from Antoines forest walks with his trusty Alsatian to the shotgun blasts fired by off-screen hunters.
There can be no question whom he considers to be the real threat in The Beasts, an unconventional yet idea-driven crime film that, like Dominik Molls The Night of the 12th, so thoroughly avoids sensationalizing the violence at its center that it all but flew beneath the radar at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Night went on to win the Csar, while Beasts racked up nine Goyas in its native Spain, suggesting that both ought to have been in competition. (Maybe Beasts was too much like Romanian director Cristian Mungius R.M.N., which also deconstructs the tensions among European communities threatened by globalization and change. R.M.N. made all of $50,000 in U.S. theaters, whereas slow-burn Beasts is enough of a thriller that it could develop a cult following.)
It helps that Sorogoyen has found the years best villain in longtime collaborator Zahera, who transforms himself into a hostile creature, glowering at Antoine and taunting him with insults (Xan calls his neighbor Francs, translated here as Frenchy, mocking the outsiders accent) over a nerve-racking game of dominoes and every subsequent time their paths cross. Zaheras menacing body language, matched by an anxious string score and arms-length camerawork as if even DP Alejandro de Pablo is wary of getting too close establishes a sense of dread so acute and pervasive it can be hard for audiences to breathe at times.
In bed at night, Olga gazes over her husbands shoulder and sees two men lurking outside their window. Tending their small but sturdy patch of tomatoes, they find signs of lead poisoning and trace the cause to a pair of car batteries thrown into their well. Only one person could have been responsible for sabotaging their entire crop. The Beasts reflects a form of violence that isnt at all rare in the real world, however seldom it may be depicted in the movies: when your new neighbors turn out to be a nightmare.
Its strange that filmmakers dont dramatize this phenomenon more often, considering how often its happened to people I know. There was the guy who bought a multi-million-dollar mansion, only to have the mobsters next door sabotage the water line, sending the clear message that they intended him to sell the house to them. Or the one whose neighbors operated a noisy body shop out of their garage; when he reported them to the city, they retaliated by cutting his brakes (luckily, he discovered the problem before the car crashed). Theres almost nothing to be done in such situations but move. The cops in both cases admitted as much.
Here, Antoine goes to the local police, and they hardly take him seriously. He buys a video camera and starts to record his increasingly aggressive interactions with the neighbors, who may not be educated, but they arent stupid either. Olga recognizes the growing risk and begs her husband to defuse the situation somehow. Instead, it gets worse.
The films big scene is upsetting and unforgettable, one of those movie moments you cant unsee and which seems destined to haunt you for years to come, as the thing weve been dreading since the beginning comes to pass. It arrives earlier than we might expect, a tragic echo of the opening footage of the rapa. But the film doesnt end there, shifting its focus from Antoine to Olga, whos obliged to reckon with her husbands actions.
Sorogoyen includes an astonishing scene with the couples daughter Marie (Marie Colomb) visits, who pleads with her mother to leave this place which Sorogoyen likens to the Wild West, adopting certain codes of the genre in his treatment of a dangerous and still-untamed frontier. The actor Marina Fos, who plays Olga, began her career making frivolous comedies, but shes fierce and uncompromising here. While much of the film plays out in subtext, the script (which Sorogoyen co-wrote with Isabel Pea) gives both sides room to express their anxieties, ultimately rewarding the character who finds the human solution to a seemingly unresolvable conflict.