Sightlines · reception

How The Beasts was received

2022 · Rodrigo Sorogoyen · The Beasts on Sightlines

The arc

A Cannes 2022 premiere that snowballed into a phenomenon in Spain — it swept nine Goyas including Best Film, then took the César for Best Foreign Film, cementing it as the Spanish thriller of its year. It's since settled in as the go-to modern answer to 'what's the tensest film you've seen lately.'

What’s debated

The perennial fight is over the late structural pivot — whether the shift in focus in the final stretch deepens the film or deflates its unbearable tension — plus the eternal rewatch question of whom the film actually sides with.

Its footprint

The bar-room face-offs between Denis Ménochet and Luis Zahera have become shorthand for slow-burn menace — 'the most stressful conversations ever filmed' is practically a Letterboxd review genre of its own — and the wild-horse-wrestling opening (Galicia's real rapa das bestas tradition) is its signature image.

Where it stands

A fast-rising canon climber: a Letterboxd favorite of the 2020s European thriller wave and an increasingly standard 'you must see this' recommendation for tension junkies.

Did you know? It's inspired by a true story — the Santoalla case, in which Dutchman Martin Verfondern moved to a near-abandoned Galician village and vanished in 2010 after a feud with neighbors (the 2016 documentary 'Santoalla' covers the real events); Sorogoyen's film changed the couple's nationality to French.