Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen cements his reputation as one of contemporary European cinema’s specialists in suspense with his hugely accomplished fourth feature. Based on real-life events, Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs play a married couple whose dream of moving to the countryside gradually turns into a living nightmare.

Antione and Olga have moved to a small village in Galicia, in Spain’s northwest. They support themselves by growing and selling their own vegetables, and in their spare time repair and refurbish abandoned cottages in the neighbourhood. It’s a quiet and peaceful existence. At least it was, until the neighbourhood are approached by Norwegian developers who are willing to pay out the residents of the neighbourhood to build a wind farm on their property. Antione and Olga are the only residents who voted against the development, much to the annoyance of two local brothers, who have grown piqued by the couple’s presence in the community. It’s an opportunity that many locals would benefit from financially. But it doesn’t fit with Antoine and Olga’s vision of their perfect country life. From this disagreement, tensions and tempers rise, pushing the situation to the point of no return.

The Garden Cinema View: Disarmingly structured and shifting from constricting thriller through quasi-anthropological (and sometimes quite idyllic) depictions of rural life, The Beasts sits alongside culture-clash nailbiters as seen in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs or John Boorman’s Deliverance. But with Denis Ménochet bringing a very different physical intensity to the likes of Dustin Hoffman, the flows of aggression in the central conflict flow both ways in this complex and breathless film.  

Cast:
Marina Foïs, Denis Ménochet, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido