The Beasts (2023)

Following a frankly pathetic UK release earlier this year, Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s excellent Spanish-French rural thriller engulfs you in tension from minute one, and doesn’t let up. Inspired by real events involving a Dutch couple in Santoalla, the film switches the setting to the Galician countryside, where French couple Antoine and Olga have settled in a small village, growing and selling their own eco-friendly crops and renovating abandoned properties so they can be lived in again. However, their presence sits very badly with some of the locals, in particular their neighbours, brothers Xan and Loren, who are especially aggrieved at the fact that Antoine and Olga opposed a vote on the sale of some land to a wind energy company, which would have made the locals some money. The tension is brilliantly built up by Sorogoyen in several low key (but no less terrifying) sequences as the audience wonders how far this spat will go, and whether this hatred from the locals is purely xenophobic or something closer to being built in, living in a remote village in rural Spain without ever leaving it or meeting new people. The performances across the board are superb, and some may recognise Denis Menochet from the astonishing opening sequence of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). There's no doubting Sorogoyen's film will find an audience, and it's a real shame that it received such a small release here; it says a lot that when you google 'The Beasts 2023 UK release' (as I found to my irritation) the first thing that appears is the release date for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. 7.9/10