5/5 Where to watch: Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video (international) and Movistar Plus+ (Spain). If you liked this: You must also watch The Hunting Ground (Spain, 2017), Marshland (2014), and The Cow who Sang a Song into the Future (2022). Have you seen As Bestas? Do you think Antoine was right to refuse the wind turbines, or was his intransigence a form of suicide? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
In the vast, windswept plains of Galicia, Spain, a different kind of horror movie is playing out. It doesn't feature jump scares, gothic castles, or supernatural entities. Instead, its terror is rooted in something far more primal: land, pride, and the thin, rusted wire of civilized discourse. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s 2022 masterpiece, As Bestas (released internationally as The Beasts ), is a slow-burn thriller that burrows under your skin with the persistence of a wood tick.
As Bestas is not a comfortable watch. It is a necessary one. It holds a mirror to the rural-urban divide and asks us to see the beast within our own reflection. In an age of polarization, Sorogoyen suggests that the most dangerous animal is not the wolf in the woods—it is the human being backed into a corner with no way out but through. as bestas rodrigo sorogoyen
In a stunning sequence, Olga walks into the local municipal office and, in perfectly articulated Galician (a dialect she previously struggled with), systematically dismantles the brothers' alibi. The final confrontation is not a shootout in a barn, but a wiretap in a police station. Sorogoyen suggests that civilization’s most powerful weapon isn’t brutality—it is patience and intelligence. The ending is ambiguous, gut-wrenching, and deeply satisfying in its moral complexity. As Bestas cannot be separated from the socio-political reality of "La España Vacía" (Empty Spain). For decades, Spanish political and economic life has centered on Madrid and Barcelona, leaving rural provinces—especially Galicia, Aragon, and Castile—to depopulate and decay.
Xan represents the rage of a forgotten class. He is not a fascist or a political extremist; he is a farmer who watches his neighbors move to the city while his land is valued only for its emptiness. When he destroys Antoine’s garden, he is attacking a symbol of privilege. The film’s genius is that while you recoil from his violence, you understand the despair that fuels it. While the setting is specifically Galician, the conflict is universal. From the Yellow Vests in France to the coal miners in Appalachia, the world is witnessing a violent clash between post-industrial localism and globalized, post-materialist values. 5/5 Where to watch: Currently streaming on Amazon
This article dissects the mechanics of As Bestas : its narrative engine, its thematic brutality, the extraordinary performances, and why the film serves as a chilling allegory for a fractured Europe. The premise is deceptively simple. An aging French couple, Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), have forsaken their homeland for a rustic life in a remote Galician village. They are environmental idealists; they rehab abandoned stone houses, plant organic crops, and live a quasi-off-grid existence. The locals view them with a mixture of suspicion and grudging tolerance—until the arrival of a wind energy company.
On the surface, it is Xan and Lorenzo. Luis Zahera delivers a volcanic, Goya-winning performance as Xan—a man so poisoned by resentment that his face twitches with barely contained rage. He is not a cartoon villain. He is a product of a dying rural economy who sees a foreigner dictating the terms of his survival. When Xan snarls, "You don’t know what hunger is," he reveals the wound: the urban elite preserving nature for their own aesthetic pleasure while rural communities starve. Do you think Antoine was right to refuse
A lucrative deal is on the table. The villagers, struggling with depopulation and an aging demographic, stand to make millions by leasing their land for industrial wind turbines. But Antoine and Olga’s plot is a strategic bottleneck. Without their signature, the entire project collapses.