The Beasts Are Human in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Stunning Ripped-from-the-Headlines Thriller

It is pretty to think that once upon a time, neighbors at odds could address and resolve petty territorial disputes over a quaff of liquor at the local bar. Pop the bottle, fill the glass; uncork empathy, find community and arrive at a solution that’s pleasing—and beneficial—to everybody. That time never really existed, or if it did, only people who share class and social strata could make use of the practice. The lead characters in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts try to work out their conflicts at the local bar; they are, in the end, too different, too proud, either too educated or not educated enough, either too worldly or too hermitical. They’re too stubborn. That’s too bad.

Sorogoyen draws on two pieces of history for The Beasts’ structure. First, Napoleon’s Spanish campaign in the 1800s, a seed sown centuries ago and yielding fruit in the film’s present. Second, and more importantly, the awful story of Martin Verfondern, German-born, Dutch-naturalized, expatriated in the Galician village of Santoalla, and murdered by his neighbors, Juan Carlos and Julio Rodríguez, in January of 2010. For the spoiler allergic, this constitutes a spoiler, but The Beasts is made with assurance and no small amount of tension, both of which blunt its headline problem: You may know of Verfondern, but you will forget about his fate under the film’s dramatic spell. Such is Sorogoyen’s talent as a writer and director. His carefully assembled and wholeheartedly dedicated cast helps, too.

The Beasts swaps Verfondern for Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs) Denis, progressive, learned, well-traveled, happily married and ready to start a new chapter in their lives by working the land in the Galician countryside. Their methods hew toward farming’s crunchier side. Pepiño (José Manuel Fernández y Blanco), the Denis’ warm-hearted and quick-witted neighbor, raises an eyebrow at stretches of land left bare. Antoine claims that the land “needs to rest.” Pepiño mocks his Spanish, then hands Olga a parcel of chorizo. Antoine and Olga’s approach to agriculture might look a little loopy to the locals, but it’s this kind of exchange that provides their community its bedrock. Here, they’re happy. They’re at home. They’re free from the buzz and hum and endlessness of urbanity. 

The welcome party doesn’t comprise the entire village, of course. Brothers Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) don’t like Antoine. They’re neutral on Olga; she’s not the one responsible for stonewalling a wind turbine development in the surrounding hills, which Xan doggedly believes would have put money in his pocket, real money, the kind that would let him taste happiness for the first time in his life, according to his own estimations. Xan pours all of his contempt into his interactions with Antoine, save for the latter’s attempt at a drinks summit that humanizes them both and glimmers with the chance for amends. The scene takes place an hour and change into The Beasts’ beefy 130-minute duration, and supplies the most suspense out of even the film’s objectively dangerous moments; a nighttime encounter on a backroad—where a rifle-toting Lorenzo and devilishly plastered Xan block Antoine and Olga’s way to their home—strikes terror, but terror is fleeting. Hope given and snatched away cuts considerably deeper. 

Sorogoyen, multi-Goya winner that he is, marks the passage of days and months and years with subtle, embedded touches: The ripening of tomatoes, the burgeoning of crispy leafy greens, the gradual improvement of a Frenchman’s Spanish, the celebration of birthdays, the decay of disused properties peppering the village. In addition to farming, Antoine and Olga restore these homes to modern glory, return them to the locals, and ask for naught in return. They’re good people. The Beasts, wisely, validates Xan’s claim that the couple thrum with superiority over the locals—not on purpose, perhaps, but by lack of self-awareness. Galicia is his home. It isn’t Antoine’s home, even if Antoine feels at home there, and wants it to be his home. Fair’s fair. But the question of whether Antoine should exercise influence over matters of enterprise is fair, too. 

In politics and in life, “both sides” moralization is a drag, because rarely is it the case that “both sides” have equivalent grievances. But in The Beasts, the blunt, clear-eyed perspective Sorogoyen and his longtime comrade-at-writing, Isabel Peña, take on the war waged between Antoine and Xan, between outsider and native, between France and Spain, is apneic. Xan’s mounting animus, and Antoine’s churning indignation, clang against one another even when they aren’t sharing the same physical space, which has a way of sucking the oxygen out of the room even in the film’s quietest moments, or perhaps especially in those moments. We, like Antoine, can’t divorce ourselves from the brothers’ xenophobia and misplaced nationalist pride, because Xan and Lorenzo linger in his mind, like bursts of sand billowing in a stiff wind. They’re there. Antoine can’t shake the sight of them, or the peril they represent. 

Most of The Beasts hangs on Ménochet’s lumbering, owlish figure, until about an hour and twenty minutes pass and the responsibilities of protagonism fall on Foïs. Ménochet is the perfect actor for the role: Physically imposing, emotionally gooey. He’s big enough that there’s nobody in the cast he can’t help but literally look down on, but his size belies his warm, nougaty center. Sorogoyen makes smart use of Ménochet’s dimension via cinematographer Alejandro de Pablo’s camera placement, tilting the lens upward so that others are dwarfed by the great Frenchman, or setting up medium shots, and holding them for minutes on end, to make a blatant display of his superior height. In an easier film, where the moral scales weigh only in Antoine’s favor, Sorogoyen’s framing might seem unfair to everyone who isn’t Ménochet. The Beasts is anything but easy, though, and if Antoine fears Xan and Lorenzo, then it’s because having a few extra pounds on the other guy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Anido has a laser drill stare most actors working in sociopathic spaces would kill for: A no-contact glance that pierces every substance and surface. This is an asset. Zahera has one better: He makes Ménochet shrink. Xan is desperation personified and unbound, infernally convinced he has nothing to lose and willing to act on his conviction, and Zahera articulates him as a howling force of nature. Does he have a point about Antoine and Olga as interlopers? Maybe. But the point is lost in his animal baying. The Beasts is a powder keg of machismo, which makes Foïs’ eventual emergence as Sorogoyen’s lead all the more meaningful—she’s able to see through what Antoine (and his male ego) can’t. 

Sorogoyen constructs this destructive exercise in dick-swinging with firm, lyrical visual language; he’s as enamored of wooded foothills in autumn and crumbling cottages as he is of manly bullshitting contests carried out over games of dominoes and of hopeless, helpless, pathetic brawls right out of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Drunken Angel. The sensation of observing these details fold into one another and unfold as a narrative isn’t that far off from turning the pages of a novel, or even a newspaper; that’s the journalistic effect of Sorogoyen’s filmmaking. The Beasts comes years after Andrew Becker’s Santoalla, a documentary feature about Verfondern’s murder, but for all of Sorogoyen’s edits to the truth, his fiction strikes just as hard. 

Director: Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Writer: Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Isabel Peña
Starring: Denis Ménochet, Marina Foïs, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido, José Manuel Fernández y Blanco
Release Date: July 28, 2023

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.