The Beasts (2022)

Rodrigo Sorogoyen has made a western, or so he says, and the Galician hills do the heavy lifting. A French couple, Antoine and Olga, farm eco-friendly crops and restore abandoned houses in a village that would prefer they leave. The neighbors want to sell land to a wind energy company. Antoine objects. The objection curdles into trespass, poisoned tomatoes, a shotgun at night, and eventually a body. Sorogoyen shoots it all with patience, letting hostility breathe in long takes until the air goes sour. It is a superb piece of filmmaking and it knows it.

The cultural inventory here is thinner than the tension. The conflict is xenophobic, yes, a French couple against Galician villagers, but the film treats it as a matter of nationality and rural resentment, not a racial-justice parable. Nobody delivers a speech about it. The wind farm, that reliable engine of contemporary moralizing, is handled with unusual ambivalence: the villagers want the buyout money to escape a dying countryside, and the film declines to call them villains for it. Lorenzo, the brother with reduced mental capacity after a childhood accident, is a character with a condition, not a lesson about inclusion. There is no romance, no identity reckoning, no sermon. The camera simply watches men decide that violence is a form of conversation.

Olga, played by Marina Foïs, spends the final act running a farm alone and confronting the killers' mother, which is a portrait of grief and stubbornness, not a thesis on womanhood. Sorogoyen is too busy generating dread to editorialize. The result is a film that could have been a lecture and chose instead to be a thriller, which is rarer than it should be. It won nine Goyas and a César, and it earned them the old-fashioned way, through craft and a willingness to let the audience sit in discomfort without a narrator explaining what to feel. A grim, excellent, and refreshingly unimproving piece of work.