The Beasts (As Bestas)

Winner of 9 Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards ©), This intimate, haunting true-crime drama — part noir thriller, part social realism — is set in a Galician farming village, a region that’s as sweepingly idyllic as it is economically depressed.

A bourgeois, expatriate French couple (Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet), committed to organic farming, settles uneasily among the poor Spanish farmers who’ve struggled for generations to earn a living from this land. They clash over whether to sell their land to foreign interests who’ve offered fast money to develop wind power. Two glowering brothers, characters who seem to have stepped directly from the nastiest scenes in Deliverance, take on the idealistic pair.

On the surface there are victims and perpetrators, but the screenplay resists oversimplifying the complex dynamics of gentrification–the privilege of imposing progressive values and the tragedy of fear-turned-to-hate.

Film website: https://greenwichentertainment.com/film/the-beasts/