Keswick Film Club - The Beasts

Synopsis

"'The Beasts' is a rural psychological thriller from Spain that has won many awards across Europe and it is a riveting, merciless study of human nature, so cleverly tense throughout that even a game of dominoes becomes menacing. You didn't know a game of dominoes could be menacing? Trust me, it can. You might never be able to look at a pack of dominoes again without feeling menaced" - Deborah Ross, The Spectator.

The awards it has won include the French Cesar award for best foreign film and Best Film at the Spanish Goya Awards plus many best acting awards for the stars Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs - both big names with over 170 films between them (you can see Marina Foïs again in 'La Syndicaliste'). Based loosely on a true story of a Dutch couple who moved to Spain, here we have Antoine and Olga, a French couple, who have moved to a tiny hamlet in Galicia to set up an organic farm. The trouble is the locals, 'hill people', do not understand them - they consider farming to be just hard work and want out. Battle lines were set when the incomers vetoed a communal plan to sell out to a wind-turbine company.

Two brothers, Xan and Lorenzo, are the main local protagonists goading Antoine especially, who eventually retaliates by filming the brothers… not a good move. "This leads inexorably to the most dramatic pivot in 'The Beasts', when Olga and, to a lesser extent, her daughter, Marie, become the protagonists. The film, then, is as much about the beastliness of Xan and Antoine's outmoded machismo as it is about the perseverance and fortitude of women in opposition to it." - William Repass, Slant Magazine.