Rodrigo Sorogoyen has crafted a film that refuses to let the audience off the hook. It is a horror movie about property lines. A thriller about pronouns (us vs. them). A tragedy where the villain is the architecture of capitalism itself.
The film charts the escalating conflict from passive-aggressive glances at the local bar to vandalism, intimidation, and finally, an act of horrific, irreversible violence. Sorogoyen does not offer catharsis. He offers a tragedy. The title is a clever trap. Who are the beasts?
Xan represents the rage of a forgotten class. He is not a fascist or a political extremist; he is a farmer who watches his neighbors move to the city while his land is valued only for its emptiness. When he destroys Antoine’s garden, he is attacking a symbol of privilege. The film’s genius is that while you recoil from his violence, you understand the despair that fuels it. While the setting is specifically Galician, the conflict is universal. From the Yellow Vests in France to the coal miners in Appalachia, the world is witnessing a violent clash between post-industrial localism and globalized, post-materialist values. as bestas rodrigo sorogoyen
In a stunning sequence, Olga walks into the local municipal office and, in perfectly articulated Galician (a dialect she previously struggled with), systematically dismantles the brothers' alibi. The final confrontation is not a shootout in a barn, but a wiretap in a police station. Sorogoyen suggests that civilization’s most powerful weapon isn’t brutality—it is patience and intelligence. The ending is ambiguous, gut-wrenching, and deeply satisfying in its moral complexity. As Bestas cannot be separated from the socio-political reality of "La España Vacía" (Empty Spain). For decades, Spanish political and economic life has centered on Madrid and Barcelona, leaving rural provinces—especially Galicia, Aragon, and Castile—to depopulate and decay.
The wind turbine conflict is real. Across Spain, green energy deals have exacerbated the divide between environmentalists (often urban incomers) and farmers (who need the cash). Sorogoyen captures the irony: the very people who claim to love the land are often the ones blocking the rural poor from making a living from it. Rodrigo Sorogoyen has crafted a film that refuses
Enter the Anta brothers: Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido). These are the "beasts" of the title—crude, muscular, and deeply embedded in the land’s identity. Xan, the more volatile of the two, views Antoine’s refusal not as a political stance, but as a declaration of war. To Xan, Antoine is a foreign parasite stopping the village’s only chance at prosperity.
As Bestas asks a brutal question: If someone is starving, how much moral authority does a well-fed person have to tell them they cannot eat? Sorogoyen does not offer catharsis
In the vast, windswept plains of Galicia, Spain, a different kind of horror movie is playing out. It doesn't feature jump scares, gothic castles, or supernatural entities. Instead, its terror is rooted in something far more primal: land, pride, and the thin, rusted wire of civilized discourse. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s 2022 masterpiece, As Bestas (released internationally as The Beasts ), is a slow-burn thriller that burrows under your skin with the persistence of a wood tick.