Film Forum

“A terrific psychological thriller and a brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking.” – Wendy Ide, Screen. An intimate, haunting true-crime drama — part noir thriller, part social realism — set in a Galician farming village (the “wild west” of Spain), a region that’s as sweepingly idyllic as it is economically depressed. A bourgeois French couple, organic farmers, settles uneasily among the poor Spanish farmers who’ve struggled for generations to earn a living from this land. They clash over whether to sell their land to foreign interests who’ve offered fast money to develop wind power. Two glowering brothers, characters who seem to have stepped directly from the nastiest scenes in DELIVERANCE, take on the idealistic pair. On the surface there are victims and perpetrators, but the screenplay by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña resists oversimplifying the complex dynamics of gentrification — the privilege of imposing progressive values and the tragedy of fear-turned-to-hate. Winner of 9 Goya Awards (Spain’s Oscar® equivalent), including Best Picture.

Presented with support from the Robert E. Appel Fund for Spanish and Portuguese Language Films

2022      137 MIN.     SPAIN / FRANCE     GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
IN SPANISH, FRENCH & GALICIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES  

Reviews

“[A] breathtakingly tense Galician thriller. Superbly acted. While the land may be fertile, it is drenched in bad blood… There’s a simmering, creeping menace to Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s superb, award-winning thriller, a sense of an inevitable collision… Sorogoyen uses long, single-take scenes to capture the explosive buildup of tension; it is a breathlessly compelling device that showcases the phenomenal quality of the acting. [Denis] Menochet brings a wounded-bear testiness to his performance, in contrast to [Luis] Zahera’s snapping, attack-dog fury. But it’s the magnificent [Marina] Foïs who carries the picture to its brutal conclusion.”
– Wendy Ide, The Observer (UK)

“A brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking which makes the most of both the Galician backdrop and the imposing physicality of [Denis] Menochet and, as his nemesis, Xan, the remarkable Luis Zahera. There is a bracing, feral savagery to the filmmaking. A percussive and urgent score adds a scratchy, nervy quality which is in clever contrast to the film’s visuals… A fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir, a Euro-arthouse twist on STRAW DOGS or DELIVERANCE.”
 – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)

“This is a clash of the Titans… though a hulking giant, Antoine [Denis Menochet] is armed only in the digicam (for gathering evidence), while Lorenzo [Diego Anido] carries a rifle, and Xan [Luis Zahera] drawls and spits with the drunken menace of Bob Ewell in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD…Yet even as THE BEASTS flirts with genre, it also remains largely true to the real-life case from which it is drawn.”
  – Anton Bitel, Little White Lies