THE BEASTS
WHAT TO KNOW
Critics Consensus Rodrigo Sorogoyen throws us into rural Galicia with The Beasts, where tension and unease spread like wildfire in a scorching tale of decayed human nature. Read critic reviews
MOVIE INFO
An expatriate French couple (Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs) operate an organic farm in the Spanish countryside. However, their earnest enthusiasm reeks of patronizing privilege to the handful of "hill people" families who have toiled on the land for generations. Tensions between locals and foreigners boil over in this edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Genre: Drama, Mystery & thriller
Original Language: French (France)
Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Producer: Ibón Cormenzana, Ignasi Estapé, Sandra Tapia, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Eduardo Villanueva, Thomas Pibarot, Jean Labadie, Anne Labadie
Writer: Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Isabel Peña
Release Date (Theaters): Jul 28, 2023 Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Sep 26, 2023
Runtime: 2h 18m
Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment
Production Co: Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals, Canal+, Latido Films, Caballo Films, Cronos Entertainment, Gobierno de España, Cofimage 33, Movistar+, Arcadia Motion Pictures, Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales, Comunidad de Madrid, SofiTVciné 9, Crea SGR, Ciné+, Le Pacte, Eurimages, Radio Televisión Española
Aspect Ratio: Digital 2.39:1
Review The Beasts review – unsettling rural noir is a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs
Middle-class incomers to a remote village in Spain’s ‘wild west’ expose fear, resentment and nationalism in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s disturbing true-crime drama
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1Wed 22 Mar 2023 09.00 GMT
Here is a fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir horror, a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs or Deliverance. It’s inspired by the true story from 2010 of a middle-class hippy idealist Dutch couple who attempted to settle in the Spanish village of Santoalla in Galicia’s remote “wild west” and fell out badly with their neighbours over their gentrification plans: a row that escalated into a nightmare. It has in fact already been the subject of a documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s Santoalla, and has now been fictionalised by film-maker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs play Antoine and Olga, an educated French couple who have moved into the area with big plans to revitalise and modernise its farming techniques. But this film doesn’t give us the gradual deterioration of their relations with the neighbours. As the story begins, they have already infuriated these people irretrievably by vetoing a communal plan to sell out to a wind-turbine company (an issue interestingly also aired in Carla Simon’s film Alcarràs). It was a one-off chance for easy money that local people wanted to grab, tiring of a lifetime of farming toil and angered by these high-handed foreigners airily telling them they’ve been doing it wrong.
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