Henry Joy 🎥 For those of you who enjoy suspense movies here’s a recommendation.

‘The Beasts’ is a movie about fear and resentment, and about Brexit-style nationalist hatreds that exist in a not-exactly-united European Union.

Official Short Trailer.


It is a fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir horror, a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs or Deliverance. It’s inspired by the true story from 2010 of a middle-class hippy idealist Dutch couple who attempted to settle in the Spanish village of Santoalla in Galicia’s remote “wild west” and fell out badly with their neighbours over their gentrification plans: a row that escalated into a nightmare. It has in fact already been the subject of a documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s Santoalla, and has now been fictionalised by film-maker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. As the story begins, the newcomers have already infuriated the locals irretrievably by vetoing a communal plan to sell out to a wind-turbine company. It was a one-off chance for easy money that local people wanted to grab, tiring of a lifetime of farming toil and angered by these high-handed foreigners airily telling them they’ve been doing it wrong.*
This movie repulsed me by times and had me crying at others, powerful cinematography (I watched it on the big screen), with stellar acting performances. 

Highly recommended.

* Abridged from a review in the Guardian.

⏩ Henry Joy is a patron of TPQ.

The Beasts

Henry Joy 🎥 For those of you who enjoy suspense movies here’s a recommendation.

‘The Beasts’ is a movie about fear and resentment, and about Brexit-style nationalist hatreds that exist in a not-exactly-united European Union.

Official Short Trailer.


It is a fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir horror, a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs or Deliverance. It’s inspired by the true story from 2010 of a middle-class hippy idealist Dutch couple who attempted to settle in the Spanish village of Santoalla in Galicia’s remote “wild west” and fell out badly with their neighbours over their gentrification plans: a row that escalated into a nightmare. It has in fact already been the subject of a documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s Santoalla, and has now been fictionalised by film-maker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. As the story begins, the newcomers have already infuriated the locals irretrievably by vetoing a communal plan to sell out to a wind-turbine company. It was a one-off chance for easy money that local people wanted to grab, tiring of a lifetime of farming toil and angered by these high-handed foreigners airily telling them they’ve been doing it wrong.*
This movie repulsed me by times and had me crying at others, powerful cinematography (I watched it on the big screen), with stellar acting performances. 

Highly recommended.

* Abridged from a review in the Guardian.

⏩ Henry Joy is a patron of TPQ.

2 comments:

  1. Fantastic film. HJ, I thoroughly enjoyed it too. It was a film that despite it's excellent story telling I'd probably only watch once. A little like the film based around the Stasi police, The Lives of Others in this respect. Both top quality but unlike the rewatchable Hollywood flicks which pale in comparison.

    I loved it and have recommended it to many. Everything about it, from its cinematography, character development etc was top-notch.

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    1. The review has certainly made me want to watch the film.

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