As bestas on Arte: beast of a film! (critical)

Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet settle in the Spanish countryside and are harassed by their nasty neighbors. Rodrigo Sorogoyen makes the air unbreathable with a rural thriller of phenomenal tension.

While Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s new film currently in theaters, The Loved One, was in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, Arte is rebroadcasting As Bestas this Wednesday evening, which caused a sensation at Cannes Première. A great rural thriller, also watch in streaming on the channel’s website, which Première highly recommends.

After entering orbit with Que Dios Nos Pardone and El Reino (followed in 2020 by the very beautiful Madre), the Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen makes a surprising turn with As bestasa semi-horror rural thriller with pronounced western overtones. This time he came to seek Denis Ménochet And Marina Fois to play a French couple, living for several years in a remote village in Galicia, very close to the Portuguese border. Antoine, a former teacher, and his partner Olga, grow vegetables in their garden – organic, of course – to sell at the local market. At the same time, they voluntarily repair ruined sheepfolds, in the hope of repopulating this poor area, which has been completely emptied of its population over the years. But their next-door neighbors have decided to poison their daily lives since they refused the installation of wind turbines in the area: Xan (Luis Zahera) and his disabled brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) were counting on the money offered by the developer to offer themselves a new life, far from this rural desert. Harassed, Antoine no longer knows what to do to calm the situation. He tries to film these threats and humiliations on a hidden camera. The tension rises and rises…

If we were to map Sorogoyen’s filmography, we would certainly have to place As Bestas at the center of everything, as the synthesis of his political obsessions and his human dramas. Through this duel to the death between colonizing bobos and soft-core earthies from the bulb, the film intends to show the mechanics of xenophobia and the rejection of the other (despite a common love for the same lands), but without seeking to transform them into theoretical objects. Sorogoyen makes the air unbreathable by personifying his words through looks, little sentences that degrade you as a man and silences that weigh heavier than a dead donkey. He also shows himself capable of reviewing his entire cinematographic language in the light of his story: no convoluted camera movements here, but many slow shots – even fixed, including one which alone manages to blur everything we took for granted – carrying within them an ancestral anger.

At the slightest suspicious change in the framework, we already project the worst (it will come, one way or another). We think of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, of course, but Sorogoyen prefers to work with psychological violence rather than physical, relying on a weapon of war named Luis Zahera (holder of a Goya for El Reino): if the rest of the cast is imperial, he touches the sublime in his Spanish redneck score, who calms his frustrations by emptying all the bottles that come to hand. An unfathomable black hole filled with resentment, a vacuum of joy of life instilling terror with a simple movement of the head.

For a long time, As Bestas appears above all as a film about the male (Evil, too) and the domination of a territory, but an unexpected shift in its second part will make it navigate towards much more feminine horizons, giving Marina Foïs the opportunity to deploy all her intensity by juggling between French and Spanish. It’s almost another film that begins then, a sort of negative of the previous one: a more cerebral and whispered family drama but just as overwhelming, where Sorogoyen settles the last scores of his characters. At the end of the screening at the Cannes Film Festival, in the parallel Cannes Première section, one question obsessed us: how could such a piece of cinema have missed the competition? Ace bestas, beast of a film.

Of Rodrigo Sorogoyen With Denis Ménochet, Marina Foïs, Luis Zahera… Duration 2 hours 17 minutes. Released July 20, 2022