Recipient of the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, as well as the prizes for Best Actor and Best Director, this Spain-France co-production is one of the few TIFF winners that seems like it could have been a contender at Cannes or Berlin. (It also won Spain’s Goya Award for Best Picture.) The Competition films at TIFF tend to be movies that aren’t submitted for competition at more famous festivals because of rules imposed by an international film festival authority that limits such films to only one competition, and so as a group they often come across as second-tier. Reviews of The Beasts at other film festivals hinted that it was very good but lacked something crucial that would make it great, maybe because it was pegged as a thriller. Watching it a second time, I picked up on nuances that eluded me initially, and I found the tension actually doubled, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen. 

When the movie begins, the problems that will eventually boil over are already simmering. Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), are a middle aged French couple who have moved to the mountains of northern Spain to start an organic vegetable farm. They are outsiders to this provincial village, and while they have made friends, their nearest neighbors, a pair of brothers named Xan (Luis Zahere) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) who raise livestock, hate Antoine’s guts, and not just because he’s French. A Norwegian company wants to buy a large parcel of land for wind turbines, and Antoine is one of the landowners who has voted against the deal. The permanently aggrieved Xan figures the money from the sale could set him up for life and relieve him of having to “smell like shit” all the time. The director, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, keeps Antoine’s reasons for spiking the deal under wraps, but it slowly comes out that he understands how this Norwegian company works, and at one point tries to reason with Xan, saying that the company is simply looking for the cheapest land in the EU, and that the money they will pay him will not set him up for life. The gambit fails, because Antoine, a former teacher, is to Xan a “tree-hugging intellectual” who looks down on people like him. The die is cast, and it becomes clear as the two men spar and feint at each other, that the title refers not just to Xan, but also to Antoine, whose resentment for being denied a comfortable, fulfilling life makes him mean and desperate. And while I was expecting some kind of Straw Dogs confrontation, what happens is different but no less terrifying, and as the focus of the movie shifts from Antoine to Olga and their frustrated adult daughter, Marie (Marie Colomb), everything you thought about the movie’s theme and expected from the plot development turn out to be wrong. 

The movie’s haunting atmosphere is deepened by the rugged landscape, the broken down stone houses that Antoine endeavors to fix up for his fellow villagers (Xan thinks he is doing it to attract more like him), and weather that can change on a dime. This is a tale about not taking people you don’t really know at face value. Xan is what he is, and the other inhabitants of these hills and forests, even when they pretend to welcome you, will just as soon wrestle you to the ground and take everything you have. It’s not a thriller. It’s a chiller, because its view of human nature will freeze your soul. 

In Spanish, French and Galician. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Beasts home page in Japanese

photo (c) Arcadia Motion Pictures, S.L., Caballo Films, S.L., Cronos Entertainment, A.I.E., Lepacte S.A.S.