Film Review: Harry Mount: The Beasts (15)
Trigger warning! This is NOT a film for second-home-owners, trying to get along with new neighbours in the country.
The Beasts is menacing, gripping – and a cautionary tale for any townies seeking a quiet rural life.
It tells the story of a French teacher and his wife who move to a smallholding in Galicia to renovate farmhouses and do some small-scale farming. The Good Life morphs into an extremely violent Bad Death.
The film is closely based on the true story of a Dutch couple who moved to Galicia to restore a ruined house and live the dream – only for the husband to be shot dead in 2010 by neighbouring farmers.
Those farmers took against the Dutch for classic NIMBY reasons: the size of their new balcony, their use of local water and their disapproval of the Spaniards’ insecticide. After the Dutchman was shot dead, he was hidden in his burnt-out car in remote woods for four years before the body was discovered.
Astonishingly, the Dutch widow went on living next door to the murderers for eight years until the police caught them. The whole tragedy was well-captured in a 2016 documentary, Santoalla.
The Beasts follows this story fairly closely without using exactly the same names and small details. Its new plot device is to invent the prospect of a wind farm – which the incomers vote against, so preventing a windfall for the impoverished locals.
You don’t need to know the real story to be agreeably spooked by the escalating menace of a neighbourhood spat that mushrooms into a murder.
In February, the film won nine Goyas – the Spanish Oscars – although it has also been criticised for portraying rural types as village idiots. In fact, the brother of the real-life murderer was mentally handicapped – his character, Lorenzo, is played beautifully as a half-charming, half-terrifying simpleton by Diego Anido.
The real battle is between his wily older brother, Xan (a wonderfully nasty Luis Zahera), and the French incomer Antoine Denis (Denis Ménochet).
Ménochet is a clever, gentle giant – his great, bulging love handles are unflatteringly on show as he takes a plunge in the local lake – driven slowly to distraction by the war of attrition waged by his horrible neighbours. They hound him with relentless banter in the local bar, poison his well and smash his wing mirror as he drives past.
It’s a very simple plot – as is often the case with real-life nastiness: neighbour bullies neighbour; neighbour kills neighbour.
There are occasional longueurs in the two hours and 17 minutes (though it’s not quite as long as some of the snoreathons mentioned by director Bruce Beresford in his article – see page 30 – on films that are too long).
But the extremely good acting and skilled directing by Rodrigo Sorogoyen (the co-writer of the lean, understated screenplay with Isabel Peña) mean boring moments are brief.
There are uplifting shots of León, where the movie was filmed – Country Life goes to Spain. But it doesn’t shy away from how dark and scary the country can be when life goes bad.
It’s also a faithful reflection of the difficulties of the agricultural life – Kingsley Amis said farming was as irritating as ‘washing up outdoors’. The French blow-ins slave away to produce their lettuces and tomatoes; the Spanish natives are ground down by the incessant, unglamorous, back-breaking work with their cattle.
All in all, it isn’t far off from being a version of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, the marvellous 1986 films of Marcel Pagnol’s 1962 novels – where two local farmers con a city type out of his inherited land.
The Beasts isn’t in that league. But it’s still compelling, boosted by its real-life foundations and the clever evocation of the dark side to country living: ‘Something nasty in the woodshed,’ as Stella Gibbons put it in Cold Comfort Farm (1932).
