Glasgow Film Festival 2023: THE BEASTS

Rodrigo Sorogoyen‘s follow up to 2019’s Madre is a tense, slow-burn that calls to mind Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs – with a Spanish flavour – and keeps you on edge throughout. Almost every frame seems loaded with violent possibility, every word spoken with an underlying threat. Shadows gather at the edges of things, and you feel it is but a matter of time before brutality bursts from the strained silence.

Set amidst the beautiful hills of rural Galicia, Sorogoyen‘s subject matter focuses on local community and the racial bias of locals. It’s also an interesting counterpoint between intellectualism and hard-graft working class mentality as the lives of the haves and the have nots clash with an often frightening intensity.

Frenchy

Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Fois) are a French couple who have recently moved to Galicia to live out their pastoral dream; enjoying a slower pace of life as they farm their land. They are both well educated city folk with a romantic notion of what this new life entails. This is in direct contrast to the locals, born and bred on this mountain, with little education and even less money. Led by Xan (a phenomenally terrifying turn from Luis Zahera), they treat Antoine with open disdain, addressing him with naked xenophobia as “Frenchy”, and call to mind the Peninsular War of 1808 when Napoleon invaded Spain.

Antoine tries his best to take this on the cheek. Offering to buy his new neighbours drinks and broadly ignoring any hostile remarks. There is, we discover, a precedent to all this: a plan to erect windmills on the land was brought to the community, which would have netted the farmers a tidy sum they may have used to leave the area. As Xan points out to Antoine, he could have bought his mother a house with the income, and allowed them a better quality of lifestyle. The offer was brought to a community vote, with Antoine voting against. The Frenchman had his ideals of the lifestyle and saw the offer for a paltry sum which would have destroyed the land and the community. He convinced others to vote against as well, ensuring the deal died and the opportunity potentially gone forever.

This is the spark that ignites the bitter blood-feud between Antoine and Xan, alongside Xan’s mentally disabled brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido). Determined to force Antoine and Olga to leave the land, the brothers begin a campaign of sinister retribution. Initial scenes are steeped in a quiet dread as Xan and Lorenzo toy with Antoine, at first taunting him like children – Lorenzo offers Antoine a ride when his car breaks down and then, as Antoine attempts to climb into the passenger seat, Lorenzo drives off, leaving Antoine stumbling back – before escalating to more devious efforts – poisoning Antoine’s tomato patch, urinating over his deck chairs, skulking outside his home at night – until Antoine snaps and decides to film the altercations for police evidence.

Watching all this with a growing sense of unease is Olga. She is the more level-headed of the two and warns her enraged husband that no good will come of filming the brothers. She keeps her distance as the scenes play out, with the tension rising slowly but surely in every scene. Finally everything builds to a horrific crescendo, which both Olga and her daughter Marie (Marie Denis) must come together to resolve.

Feral and Ferocious

The Beasts is a suitably animalistic film; feral and ferocious in equal measure. The opening scenes of men wrestling wild horses – portending later tragedy – summate the core themes: that of hard-scrabble living; wild, unpredictable nature; savagery in the name of survival. The filmmaking itself pays tribute to this.  A wild, percussive score jolts the viewer any time they may be tempted to ease into comfort; exterior scenes don’t attempt to glorify the rugged Spanish landscape; interiors speak of destitution and rough spun living. The brothers’ own feral nature – at one point as they ambush Antoine and Olga in the couple’s car, Xan slamming his head against one window, Lorenzo using his fingers to pry the other one down – adds to the feeling of creeping horror.

The Beasts is not, however, without its faults. A dramatic tonal shift at the top of the second act brings Olga and her daughter to the fore, switching from tense horror/thriller to a more sombre affair with feels entirely at odds with the movie we’ve been watching. This tonal shift gives way to a third act which is far too long and drawn out; viewers may feel restless watching the placid Olga trudge her way through the wreckage of her husband’s war with their neighbours. Marie provides a spark of fury, an attempt to rush proceedings a little, and there are compelling scenes between mother and daughter as they reckon with each other’s natures, but ultimately it feels as though it may belong to a different film.

As far as performances go, Luis Zahera shines as the wolf-life Xan, all hard-eyed and predatory. Xan pokes and prods at Antoine restlessly, and a moment with the three men in the local bar is an excellent example of building tension through dialogue, shot in a single, unbroken take. Zahera gives Xan a small moment of vulnerability here, an instant where we understand his plight and his reasons for hating Antoine. It makes him all the more malevolent for understanding his motivation.

Denis Menochet provides something of a wiry, nervous performance as Antoine; he has the weight advantage and you feel the borderline skeletal Xan would pose little threat to him, yet Antoine is in a strange land against enemies who know the area better than he does, and whose mendacious gaslighting he seems wholly unprepared to cope with. Antoine is an intellectual who is used to reason and debate, but faced with a different kind of confrontation he is lost at sea, unable to meet his aggressors on their own terms.

Marina Fois has little to do as Olga, initially. She watches grimly from the sidelines, occasionally entreating her husband to back down before it goes too far. In the third act, she has much more to do, portraying Olga with an encumbered weight she steadfastly refuses to put down. Even in the face of her daughter – and here Marie Denis does well as the furious daughter who cannot contend with the obliviousness of the local police, nor the simplistic nature of life her mother has chosen – Olga refuses to back down, only once, during an excellent scene between her and Marie, losing her temper. Although the latter half of The Beasts drags, it is Fois who provides the engine it requires to reach the end.

Conclusion

At over two and a half hours, The Beasts cannot sustain its pacing – especially with a jarring third act that drains it of all its tension. Up to that point, however, it is a terrific, tense, and brutal tale of class warfare, animalistic nature, and devastating consequences. More akin, in its earlier scenes at least, to horror than thriller, Sorogoyen‘s effort combines the raw beauty of Galicia’s rural interior with its brutal lifestyle to achieve a thrilling narrative.

The Beasts screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival 2023

Watch The Beasts