As Bestas

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's As Bestas opened at Cannes 2022 and in February 2023 won nine Goyas, the most for any Spanish film that awards year, among them Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña) and Best Actor (Luis Zahera). Coming after The Realm, it made Sorogoyen one of the most internationally prominent Spanish directors of his generation, and it brought the neglected Galician interior to the screen as a landscape worth looking at.

A French couple, Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), have left the city for a small Galician village, where they farm organically and are restoring an abandoned farmhouse. A wind-farm developer offers to buy out every resident, a deal that would bring real money into a poor village. When Antoine and Olga refuse to sign, they are drawn into a slow, escalating conflict with two local brothers, Xan and Lorenzo (Luis Zahera and Diego Anido), whose lives have been shaped by the impossibility of leaving.

It works as a moral thriller and as social-realist drama, and it is also a study of the resentments that rural depopulation breeds. Sorogoyen and Peña's screenplay is among the most carefully constructed of the 2020s, and it never hurries. Alejandro de Pablo photographs the Galician countryside, its wind and its silences, as well as anyone in recent Spanish cinema has photographed a landscape.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Sorogoyen's best film and the strongest thing in our Spanish shelf. A French couple restoring a house in a depopulated Galician village fall out with the neighbours over a wind-farm vote, and the tension is built almost entirely out of conversation in a bar. Denis Ménochet and Luis Zahera are extraordinary, and it won nine Goyas.