The Beasts

Snapshot

The Beasts (Galician/Spanish title As bestas; French As bestas / Les Bêtes) is a slow-burn rural thriller from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, built around a land dispute that curdles into violence in a depopulated corner of interior Galicia. Antoine and Olga, a middle-aged French couple, have resettled in a near-abandoned hamlet to farm organically and restore ruined houses; their refusal to sign off on a wind-turbine company's buyout — a deal that would give their struggling neighbours a rare cash windfall — hardens a simmering resentment into a campaign of intimidation and, eventually, murder. The film is notable for a formal decision that distinguishes it from most thrillers of xenophobic menace: it does not end with the central act of violence but continues past it, handing the second movement to Olga and her reckoning with grief, tenacity, and the near-impossibility of justice. Premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and released to strong critical acclaim, it became one of the defining Spanish films of its year, sweeping the Goya Awards. It is loosely inspired by a real-life case of a foreign settler killed by neighbours in rural Galicia.

Industry & production

The Beasts is a Spanish–French co-production, a status that is not incidental but structural to the film's subject: its central conflict is literally between Spanish locals and French incomers, and the financing mirrors the fiction. On the Spanish side the picture was produced through Arcadia Motion Pictures and Sorogoyen's associated production apparatus (Caballo Films and Cronos Entertainment are among the credited entities), with French partner Le Pacte handling French production and distribution. This cross-border arrangement gave the film access to both national talent pools — a mostly French pair of leads (Denis Ménochet, Marina Foïs) against Galician and Spanish supporting players (Luis Zahera, Diego Anido) — and to the two countries' public-funding and festival ecosystems.

The production was shot on location in interior Galicia, in the mountainous, sparsely populated country of the Ourense province region, and the film's texture depends heavily on that authenticity: real stone hamlets in various states of ruin and repopulation, working farms, and the specific damp, green, low-cloud light of the Galician interior. Sorogoyen has spoken in interviews of wanting the landscape to feel lived-in and hostile at once — beautiful but closing in. I don't have reliable figures for the budget or box-office gross, and would rather not guess at them; what is documented is the film's outsized awards and festival footprint relative to its modest, regional scale.

Technology

The film was shot digitally, in the widescreen anamorphic-adjacent register that has become standard for prestige European drama, though I don't have a verified camera-and-lens package to cite and won't invent one. What matters technologically is less the specific hardware than the deployment: available and naturalistic light, long lenses that flatten and compress the couple against the hills, and a controlled palette of greens, greys, and earth tones that resists the picturesque. The production leaned on real locations and practical conditions rather than sets or heavy digital augmentation. The wind-turbine element — the "molinos"/eólicos whose promise of money drives the plot — is handled largely as an off-screen economic pressure rather than a spectacle of infrastructure, a restraint that keeps the film's attention on human faces rather than machinery.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is credited to Álex de Pablo (Alejandro de Pablo), a regular Sorogoyen collaborator. The visual strategy is one of patient, often static or slowly reframing compositions that let tension accumulate within the shot rather than through cutting. The film opens on one of its most celebrated images — the rapa das bestas, the traditional Galician ritual in which men wrestle wild horses to the ground to shear them, shot in slow motion and close in on straining bodies and animal panic. It is a thesis statement in a single sequence: the title's "beasts" are the men as much as the horses, and the film's whole moral field of masculine force, territory, and the body is compressed into it. Elsewhere de Pablo favours wide framings that isolate Antoine and Olga in the landscape and tight two-shots for the escalating confrontations, particularly the recurring scenes in the village bar and along the dirt tracks where the couple crosses paths with the brothers Xan and Lorenzo.

Editing

The editing (Alberto del Campo, another recurring Sorogoyen collaborator) is defined by duration and withholding. The film runs long by thriller standards — well over two hours — and much of its dread comes from scenes allowed to extend past the point of comfort, the cut delayed so that the viewer, like Antoine, cannot look away or leave. The most discussed structural choice is the film's bipartite architecture: the editing sustains a first movement of mounting male confrontation, then, after the pivotal violence, resets the film's clock and rhythm around Olga's aftermath, a tonal and temporal shift that a more conventional cut would have refused.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Sorogoyen and his team stage the drama around thresholds and territory: property lines, gates, the doorway of the bar, the boundary of the couple's land. Confrontations are blocked so that bodies crowd and obstruct — the brothers physically occupying space Antoine wants to pass through. The single most cited set-piece is a long dialogue scene in the local bar in which Xan needles Antoine with a slow, escalating provocation, staged with minimal cutting so that the menace lives in proximity and in the actors' faces. The staging consistently frames the couple as observed — watched from windows, followed on roads — dramatising surveillance without ever needing to make it explicit.

Sound

Sound design is central to the film's atmosphere: wind, animals, the ambient hum of the rural night, and long stretches without music that make sudden noises land like blows. The score is by Olivier Arson, who scored Sorogoyen's The Realm (El reino); here his contribution is sparing and textural rather than melodic, deployed to thicken dread rather than to cue emotion. The film's soundscape also foregrounds language itself as sound — the friction of French, Castilian Spanish, and Galician colliding, mutual incomprehension weaponised.

Performance

The performances are the film's engine. Denis Ménochet plays Antoine as a man whose principled stubbornness is inseparable from a certain foreign obliviousness — decent, immovable, and quietly provoking. Marina Foïs, as Olga, delivers the film's gravitational centre in its second half, a performance of controlled, unshowy grief and resolve. But the widely singled-out turn is Luis Zahera as Xan, the elder brother, a portrait of grievance and thwarted men that is menacing without ever tipping into caricature; Diego Anido as the slower brother Lorenzo completes the pair. Critics repeatedly noted that the film refuses to flatten the antagonists into monsters — it lets their economic desperation register as real — and the performances carry that moral complication.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The dramatic mode is the slow-burn thriller crossed with the rural social drama, structured as a two-part diptych. The first part is a study in escalating harassment told largely from Antoine's point of view: the accumulation of small hostilities — poisoned water, sabotaged crops, verbal threats — toward an inevitability the film makes the viewer dread. The narrative pivots on an act of violence and then, unusually, keeps going, shifting to Olga and her refusal to leave, her pursuit of the truth, and a final, quiet confrontation with the mother of the perpetrators. This structure converts a genre of suspense-and-payoff into something closer to tragedy and aftermath. The dramatic irony is bitter: the couple's "eco-responsible" idealism and the neighbours' need for money are both legible, both human, and mutually annihilating.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of the "rural noir" or country-thriller and the European art-cinema social drama. It belongs to a recognisable cycle of films about outsiders in hostile provincial communities and about land, resentment, and violence — a lineage that includes Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (frequently invoked by critics as a reference point for the incomer-under-siege premise) and, in a Spanish context, the tradition of the "españolada" rural darkness reworked for the contemporary art house. It also participates in a very current cycle of films about depopulation ("la España vaciada"), wind-energy land grabs, and the tensions of rural repopulation by urban and foreign settlers — subjects newly charged in 2020s Spain.

Authorship & method

Rodrigo Sorogoyen writes with Isabel Peña, his consistent screenwriting partner across May God Save Us (Que Dios nos perdone), The Realm, Madre, and the acclaimed series Riot Police (Antidisturbios). Their method is one of dense, research-driven realism and morally ambiguous conflict, typically built around institutional or social pressure crushing individuals; The Beasts transposes that method from the urban/political sphere of The Realm to the rural and interpersonal. Sorogoyen's craft signature — long takes, sustained tension, virtuoso dialogue confrontations, and an ensemble-naturalist approach to performance — is fully present here. His key collaborators recur across the body of work: cinematographer Álex de Pablo, editor Alberto del Campo, and composer Olivier Arson, giving the films a consistent house style of controlled, escalating dread. The casting of French leads is itself a method choice, using real linguistic and cultural distance between the actors to generate the film's central friction.

Movement / national cinema

The Beasts belongs to the strong current of 21st-century Spanish auteur cinema that has gained international festival traction — a wave that also includes figures like Rodrigo Cortés, Alberto Rodríguez, and the Almodóvar-descended prestige sector — while distinguishing itself through its regional specificity. Its use of Galician language and setting connects it to a growing visibility of Galician cinema and of Spain's stateless nations and minority languages on screen. As a Spanish–French co-production it also sits within the broader framework of European co-production cinema, and its themes of rural depopulation and green-energy land conflict make it a document of a specifically contemporary Spanish national conversation.

Era / period

The film is set in the present day, and its concerns are pointedly of the 2020s: the depopulation of rural interior Spain, the arrival of foreign and urban settlers seeking a "return to the land," and the arrival of renewable-energy companies offering money for land rights in economically hollowed-out regions. It captures a moment when the abstractions of climate policy, globalised mobility, and rural precarity meet on a single hillside. Released in 2022, it arrived amid heightened European attention to energy, land, and the fault lines between cosmopolitan idealism and local economic reality.

Themes

The film's governing themes are territory and belonging — who has the right to land, and what "improvement" means to those who never chose to leave. It anatomises masculinity and violence (the rapa das bestas prologue equating men and beasts), and the collision between ecological idealism and economic desperation, refusing to let either side be simply right. Xenophobia and the figure of the outsider run throughout, dramatised through language barriers and the couple's incomprehension of the codes of a community they've entered. Underneath is a meditation on stubbornness and pride as both virtue and fatal flaw. The second half opens a further theme: grief, endurance, and the gendered persistence of a woman who stays when leaving would be sane, and the near-impossibility of justice in a closed rural world.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, The Beasts was among the best-received Spanish films of 2022, praised for its sustained tension, its moral even-handedness, and Luis Zahera's antagonist. It premiered at Cannes in 2022 and went on to a dominant awards run at the 2023 Goya Awards, where it won a large sweep of prizes — reported at nine wins including Best Film and Best Director for Sorogoyen — cementing its status as the year's Spanish standard-bearer. (I'd flag that I'm confident of the Best Film and Best Director wins and the film's overall dominance, but would want to verify the full category-by-category list before asserting each specific award.) It also drew recognition in France given its co-production status and French cast.

On the backward axis of influence, the film draws on the siege-in-the-countryside thriller tradition — Straw Dogs above all — and on the Spanish and broader European tradition of rural dread. Most concretely, it is widely reported to be loosely inspired by a real case: the killing of a foreign settler by neighbours in a Galician hamlet in a dispute over land, a case also treated in documentary form (the film Santoalla, 2016, concerns the disappearance of a Dutch settler in Ourense, and is frequently cited as the real-world touchstone). Sorogoyen has acknowledged real events as a starting point while fictionalising freely, and the record on the exact degree of adaptation is best treated with caution rather than overstated.

On the forward axis, the film's most tangible legacy is its role in raising the international profile of Galician-set, minority-language Spanish cinema and in modelling a way to make an issue-driven rural thriller — depopulation, green energy, xenophobia — without didacticism. It further consolidated Sorogoyen and Peña as one of the most important writer-director partnerships in contemporary Spanish film and reinforced a template, visible across their subsequent work, in which genre tension is used as a delivery system for social and moral inquiry. Its influence on films still in production is by nature not yet fully legible, and I'd rather note that honestly than overclaim a lineage that history hasn't yet written.