Rodrigo Sorogoyen is one of the Spanish film directors that I follow and particularly appreciate. Several of his successful films in the last decade have been political thrillers set in urban settings. ‘As bestas‘ (‘The Beasts’) is apparently a very different film. The story takes place in the countryside, in a half-abandoned village in the mountainous area of Galicia. It can be said that this film is also a psychological thriller and that it also has a political and social substratum addressing themes such as xenophobia, the differences in economic development between industrialized cities and agriculture-based villages, the conflict between modern and archaic. The film has been compared to Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ (1971), but it mostly reminded me of ‘R.M.N.’ by Cristian Mungiu, made in Romania around the same time as ‘As bestas‘. If we are to judge by these two films, the problems faced by the rural communities at the two edges of the European Union are very similar.
Antoine and Olga are a French couple, past their prime but strong enough to decide to open a new stage in their lives by buying land in a village in a poor and mountainous area of Spain and working it. They start organic farming, plan to raise animals for milk and cheese, and renovate abandoned houses to turn them into cottages for tourism. Their arrival should, in principle, please the neighbors who are facing economic problems in a depopulated village. But what happens is exactly the opposite. The main reason is that the French couple opposes the sale of land to a company that builds wind turbines in the windy mountainous area. A key scene, a discussion, somewhere in the middle of the film, clarifies the positions of the two sides. For most viewers, the French couple’s perspective is easier to understand. But the villagers also have a point that can be respected. The land they live on for generations bears fruit if a lot of hard work is invested. Despite their work, the villagers remain poor and many have had to leave for the cities. Selling the land would perhaps mean enough money for them to move and start new lives elsewhere. It is a unique opportunity, as if the investors are refused, they can go to another village. It is precisely the foreigners who have been here for only two years who are resisting selling their lot. The tragedy is that this conflict starts from jokes, evolves into social ostracism of newcomers and sabotage of their work, and threatens to generate even more violence. This is where the thriller part begins, with a build-up of tension approaching explosion. Romanian viewers will find the atmosphere familiar. It is similar to that of Slavici and Rebreanu’s novels (and the films inspired by them), with tough peasants and land conflicts, with violence and revenge, with exceptionally strong and well-defined female characters.
The story is very well told. Rodrigo Sorogoyen proves to be just as adept at building a believable and fluid narrative and authentically recreating the countryside as he has done with big city environments and even Spanish politics in other films. The roles of the two French people are played by two French actors – Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet – who had to learn Spanish for this film to be credible as their two characters who have been living in Spain for two years. She in particular is formidable. Another outstanding performance is that of Luis Zahera as Xan, the cunning and violent neighbor who will do everything to eliminate the danger in his life caused by the appearance of strangers. The tension between archaic and modern, between locals and foreigners, is rendered realistically, almost naturalistically, but everything is enveloped in the special space of the nature that dominates and marks the rhythm of people’s lives. ‘As bestas‘ is both a thriller of a special kind and a film that offers another perspective of the conflicts on the periphery of Europe.