Film Forum Hosts U.S. Premiere of Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beasts (2023)

New York City’s Film Forum will host the U.S. theatrical premiere of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts on Friday, July 28. An intimate, haunting true-crime drama — part noir thriller, part social realism — set in a Galician farming village that’s part of an area called the “wild west” of Spain. The region is as sweepingly idyllic as it is economically depressed.

The Beasts centers on a bourgeois French couple that are organic farmers, played by Denis Ménochet (the farmer in the opening sequence of Inglorious Basterds) and Marina Foïs (Polisse), that settle 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 by Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña resists oversimplifying the complex dynamics of gentrification — the privilege of imposing progressive values and the tragedy of fear-turned-to-hate.