THE BEASTS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Beasts, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 27, 2023

A common notion is that you can't choose your family but can choose your friends (or vice versa, depending on which part one wants to emphasize). Lost in that dichotomy is another part of everyday life: You rarely get to choose your neighbors. The couple at the center of The Beasts, a frightening and low-key thriller, certainly didn't get to choose to end up so close to such terrible people. Regardless, they have to deal with the situation, while also being perceived as outsiders themselves—a very non-neighborly category—within a small village of tightly knit people.

Co-writer/director Rodrigo Sorogoyen's film revolves around circumstances so relatively ordinary that the story's rising dread feels even more dreadful than might seem possible. The whole thing escalates to a crescendo of seemingly unavoidable horror, before slowing down for us to feel the consequences of what has unfolded.

That first, lengthy section is far more successful, of course, although witnessing a sense of normalcy return after the story's shocking climax does highlight just how awful the whole nasty affair becomes. We meet Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga Denis (Marina Foïs), a middle-aged married couple who originally hail from France but, in recent years, have come to the region of Galicia in Spain. The two are farmers, selling their organic crop at the local market and making a comfortable living.

This is despite the poverty surrounding them. This village was once filled with people, but now, only the stubborn and/or those without the means to move elsewhere remain. Antoine loves the place, though, because it has become a sanctuary from his previous, unfulfilling, and nearly self-destructive life in the city. Later in the story, he tells the tale of how he and Olga came to move here, following a drunken bit of wandering that somehow took him from his former home in a French city to the Northwest of Spain. He awoke from his stupor in a field, gazing up at the stars and realized that he had found a new home.

It's a romantic story of redemption, optimism, and self-fulfillment. It means nothing to his nearest neighbors, a pair of brothers named Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido), who have lived in the village their entire lives and have seen so many of their neighbors leave for something, if not better, then different. Empty houses have fallen into ruins. The brothers' own farm, where they live with their elderly mother (played by Luisa Merelas), has seen far better days, and when they're not working with the few horses that remain, the brothers play dominoes and get drunk at the local tavern.

Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña's screenplay throws us right into the middle of tension that has been building between Antoine and the brothers. A foreign energy company wants to buy land from the remaining villagers in order to build wind turbines there. Xan and six other farm owners want to sell, but Antoine doesn't and convinced a local shepherd (played by Gonzalo García) to vote against the deal, too. The village newcomer wants to revitalize the place, renovating homes with Olga in hopes of bringing in new neighbors, but Xan suspects Antoine just wants to bring in unwelcome tourists or, worse, more educated people like himself, who believe they know what's best for everyone around them.

In terms of setup, that's essentially it, and the rest of the story becomes a battle of wills between Antoine and Xan, with Olga bemoaning the specific ways her husband is antagonizing the neighbor and Lorenzo, who suffered a traumatic head injury years ago while tending to a horse, going along with whatever his older brother wants. These are two extremely inflexible, indignant men, which means they would almost certainly fight over anything that might come between them at any given point. Since both men see the turbine deal or its failure as the one thing guaranteeing or preventing the only hope they have in the world, though, this fight is only going to become uglier as it progresses.

For our benefit, Sorogoyen and Peña ensure that each man's perspective is understandable and, at least initially, reasonably argued. For our frustration, the filmmakers make both men so stubborn and irritable that it's difficult, if not impossible, to take a side.

For the necessity of this being a thriller, though, Sorogoyen chooses Antoine as the main protagonist here, since he's responding to the sabotage, aggression, and implied threats being perpetrated by the siblings. He's armed with small video camera, hoping to gather evidence for the local police, while Xan and Lorenzo have a shotgun, a real sense of desperation, and the implicit sympathy of the rest of the villagers, including the cops.

The tactics, from intimidation to an attempt to ruin the couple's crop, build, as does the tension of the standoff, which is at an impasse in terms of rational debate (as proven during a late attempt at one in the bar) but only has terrible room to grow in terms of action and retaliation. The climactic sequence of it is a genuine surprise, if only because the conclusion of the stalemate is so conclusive and senseless, while still horrifically believable, under the circumstances.

After that, the story doesn't quite have any room to grow. Even so, the third act's mournful air for the absence of any tangible answers and depiction of real resilience, not stubbornness, matches the shift to a new perspective. Mostly, The Beasts is a genuinely unsettling depiction of a not-at-all-neighborly feud taken to extremes but portrayed as alarmingly ordinary.

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