By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The Spanish-French thriller The Beasts (As Bestas), which premiered at Cannes last year, follows a French couple living in the Galician countryside who end up clashing up against the locals.

Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and his wife Olga (Marina Foïs) are older expatriates from France who have set up a quiet life for themselves on a farm in rural Galicia, growing their own food to sell at the market and fixing up abandoned houses.

But their presence as non-natives trying to live off the land has struck a chord with neighbours who view them not so much as outsiders, but more as intruders who have come because they idolize this rustic way of life but don’t really understand the brutish realities of it.

The main antagonizers to Antoine and Olga are the hardened farmer Xan (Luis Zahera) and his off-kilter younger brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido), who resent the couple for standing in the way of selling off their farmland to an energy company to build wind turbines. But this somewhat straight-forward land dispute also gets at something far more primal; while their disagreements include arguing over what are the best farming practices, Xan also reveals a more deep-seated xenophobia against the French and newcomers in general.

As these arguments and disagreements between them escalate, Antoine starts secretly filming their interactions, which threatens to inflame the situation even further. Loosely inspired by true events, it’s clear from the beginning that The Beasts is heading nowhere good in terms of this stalemate between Antoine and Xan, and the film works best as a portrait of two people who have reached an impasse, sending them down a stark, abjectly tragic path due to an inability or refusal to see eye-to-eye.

Over the film’s steadily building first two-thirds, it becomes increasingly clear that these arguments, often fuelled by alcohol, are simply going in circles, only serving to deepen the already great divide between these two men. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Isabel Peña, allows his film to unfold with a tightly controlled tone, building tension through these escalating argument scenes that reveal long buried resentments, and are mostly captured in long takes by cinematographer Alex de Pablo.

As a thriller, The Beasts is often the slowest of slow burns, but it builds with simmering tension that we know has to boil over at a certain point. The film’s central dispute remains compelling to watch thanks to the complimenting performances by Ménochet and Zahera; the former believably portrays a man being pushed over the edge, while the latter brilliantly depicts Xan’s way of needling away at Antoine through snide dismissals and seething anger that slowly but steadily hisses out of him like steam from a kettle.

Despite the true-crime underpinnings of The Beasts, Sorogoyen also infuses the film with thought-provoking narrative undertones, and quieter moments between the verbal fireworks that reveal a more somber, parable-like quality to the storytelling. It builds to a last act that pivots, but is perhaps poetic in its own way, charting the ricocheting consequences of what mostly started as a dispute between two men.

The Beasts opens exclusively in limited release on August 11th, including at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. It’s being distributed in Canada by levelFILM.