As Bestas

Rodrigo Sorogoyen's As Bestas opened at Cannes 2022 and won nine Goyas in February 2023 — the most for any single Spanish film of the awards year — including Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña), and Best Actor (Luis Zahera). The film made Sorogoyen, after his earlier The Realm, one of the most internationally significant Spanish directors of his generation, and brought widespread attention to the under-represented Galician interior as a cinematic landscape.

A French couple, Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), have moved from the city to a small Galician village to farm organically and restore an abandoned farmhouse. When a wind-farm developer offers to buy out every resident — a deal that would deliver substantial cash to the impoverished village — Antoine and Olga's refusal to sign locks them in slow, escalating conflict with two local brothers, Xan and Lorenzo (Luis Zahera and Diego Anido), whose lives have been defined by the impossibility of leaving.

The film operates simultaneously as moral thriller, social-realist drama and study of how rural depopulation produces the resentments it produces. The screenplay's structural switch in the final third — from one perspective to another — is among the most carefully built shifts of the 2020s. Alejandro de Pablo's photography of the Galician countryside, the wind, the silence, is one of the great recent landscape registers in Spanish cinema.