The Beasts

The Beasts opens with Xan Anta (Luis Zahera) and his younger broth­er Loren­zo (Diego Anido) wrestling to get con­trol of a wild horse. The scene, for all its mus­cu­lar vio­lence, is shot in close-up, which makes the strug­gle look pecu­liar­ly inti­mate, with the men’s grip on the beast’s neck a tough yet also ten­der embrace. This open­ing will lat­er find its mir­ror when we the Anta broth­ers treat a human char­ac­ter sim­i­lar­ly. Indeed, Rodri­go Sorogoyen’s fea­ture is struc­tured around sym­me­tries and recur­rences, high­light­ing not just the nuanced com­par­isons and con­trasts in the sto­ry (co-writ­ten with Isabel Peña), but also the cycles of the sea­sons and rhymes of nature in this remote part of Galicia.

Slow-wit­ted (from a child­hood acci­dent with a horse), cru­el Loren­zo and his even-mean­er broth­er live in pover­ty on a cat­tle farm with their moth­er (Luisa Mere­las), and engage in an esca­lat­ing feud with the only oth­er res­i­dents of this oth­er­wise aban­doned ghost town. Antoine (Denis Méno­chet) and Olga Denis (Mari­na Foïs) moved here two years ago from France, hop­ing for a life clos­er to nature, and as they intro­duce organ­ic meth­ods of farm­ing and set about slow­ly restor­ing some of the emp­ty hous­es, this cou­ple are dis­tin­guished from their neigh­bours by their prove­nance, their intel­lect, their world­li­ness, and their polit­i­cal refusal to vote for a local wind tur­bine scheme.

Besides his xeno­pho­bia, and a dis­like for Antoine that seems root­ed as much in envy as ani­mos­i­ty, Xan imag­ines that the tur­bines will bring a life-chang­ing wind­fall – and so begins an increas­ing­ly vicious cam­paign against the cou­ple next door, threat­en­ing not just their liveli­hood, but their very lives. ​“We’ll both do what we have to do,” Xan tells Antoine, refer­ring to him­self and his broth­er in the reg­is­ter of an oater. 

Sure enough, this is a clash of the Titans (Titan also being the name of Antoine’s dog). Though a hulk­ing giant (who mock-roars at his wife like a mon­ster at the local riv­er), Antoine is armed only with a digi­cam (for gath­er­ing evi­dence), while Loren­zo car­ries a rifle, and Xan 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, so that the big three-cor­nered duel that would be the cli­max of a west­ern comes here at the half-way point and allows the rest of the film to aban­don mas­cu­line blus­ter and focus on a qui­eter female sto­icism. Olga may at first have been more reluc­tant than her hus­band to leave France, their friends, and even their daugh­ter, but in this hos­tile envi­ron­ment, where ​“the hill peo­ple are sim­ple, which is good and bad”, Foïs’ recen­tred char­ac­ter slow­ly finds her own rhythm, and learns to tame the beasts.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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