‘The Beasts’ Review: Rich Soil for a Thriller Movie

In “The Beasts,” a genial farmer named Antoine is trying to make a living selling tomatoes and other produce in farmer’s markets in Galicia in the Spanish countryside. So why do two brothers from a neighboring parcel of land seem eager to launch a vendetta against him? It isn’t till the middle of the film that we come to recognize that the villains of the piece have an unnervingly valid complaint.

A winner of nine Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best picture and best director, the film centers on the friendly, honest, bear-like Antoine, underplayed by Denis Ménochet. Together with his wife, Olga (Marina Foïs ), he is trying to reset his life in late middle age. The couple are French, and certain among the villagers won’t let them forget it. Olga tells her husband that they want to kill him; he scoffs.

Unlike the peasants around him (who meet in a shabby excuse for a bar, which is about as welcoming as the average tool shed and tells us everything about the level of poverty in the area), Antoine is an educated man, a teacher. Dedicated as he is to his small farm, he is essentially a dilettante for whom growing produce is an interesting new hobby. But to those who have always lived in the village, farming is more like a curse from which they long to be released. Developers from outside the region have offered to buy up the land for windmills, and after generations of grueling toil, the brothers who live near Antoine are eager to cash out and do something else with their lives.

Xan (terrifyingly realized by Luis Zahera ), the spiteful and resourceful embodiment of the locals’ grievances, and his dim sibling, Lorenzo (played with an equally unsettling blankness by Diego Anido ), have dreams of moving to a city and buying a taxi with the proceeds of the sale. Antoine is blocking the sale, though, because his life goals are in direct opposition to theirs. Having had enough of his more urban job, he’s eager to replenish his soul by working the land. Selling the odd bag of vegetables suits him just fine; he derives pleasure from lovingly nurturing his organic offerings. The brothers would very much like him to change his mind, though, and their menacing air can be persuasive. As things grow increasingly frosty between the two sides, it starts to seem as though Xan and Lorenzo might be capable of anything.

The sharp contrast between two ways of thinking—with the newcomer being the one resolute on sticking to old-fashioned ways, and the long-term residents eager to abandon everything they know and plunge into a new technology—makes an unusually thoughtful foundation for a noir thriller, and the sinister brothers imbue the film with more and more dread as it goes on. Some may be reminded of other films about sophisticated but naive protagonists being confronted by wily, inexplicably hostile country folk—“Straw Dogs” and “Deliverance” come to mind—but an even louder echo is Claude Berri’s classic film “ Jean de Florette, ” the 1986 drama in which Gérard Depardieu played an amiable urban tax collector with little understanding of the farm he inherits. Jean humbly sets out to make it work, not suspecting that his neighbors are engaged in a hateful sabotage campaign against him.

Both films’ plots are intently focused on the importance of having a source of water, and both feature daughters who figure to keep the intrigue going into the next generation. But Mr. Ménochet’s Antoine can’t compete with the uncontainable charm of Mr. Depardieu, who gave a glowing performance as Jean. Antoine’s controlled, watchful aura does finely capture how serious the stakes might be as his feud with the brothers escalates, but he doesn’t have the kind of ebullient determination that gave the audience such a deep, emotional connection to Jean.

Co-written and directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, “The Beasts” has a somewhat formulaic plot, but it resists easy stereotyping about xenophobes and the rural mindset. If the brothers weren’t so insistent on a threatening attitude, it would be easy to feel sorry for them, understanding that the only life either of them has ever known is subsistence-level drudgery. From their point of view, Antoine represents a kind of walking insult, a fellow who treats agriculture as a lark while denying them the only chance they’ve ever had to earn a large payday. In balancing the two sides’ competing motives, Mr. Sorogoyen has fashioned not only a taut drama but a parable that is widely applicable across many cultures at this moment. The word “gentrification” hovers unspoken over everything, in a fascinatingly unexpected way: What if upscale newcomers wanted to preserve the land and the deep-rooted old-timers wanted to despoil it with windmills? Who has the stronger claim?