As Bestas

As Bestas (English title: The Beasts) is a 2022 Spanish-French rural thriller directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and co-written with Isabel Peña, in which a French couple settled in a depopulated Galician village is driven into open hostility and violence with their neighbors over a wind-farm project.¹ It premiered in the Cannes Première section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival² and went on to win nine Goya Awards in 2023, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.³

Real-life basis

The screenplay draws on the case known in Spain as the "crimen de Santaolalla." In 1997 the Dutch electrician Martin Verfondern, born in Germany, moved with his wife Margo Pool to the hamlet of Santoalla in Petín, in the province of Ourense, to start an agricultural venture. In early 2010 he disappeared, and it was later established that he had been murdered by one of his neighbors.⁶ In the film the couple's nationality is changed from Dutch to French.⁸ Some parts of the story follow the real events closely while others are fictionalized.⁸

Development and production

The idea came from Isabel Peña, Sorogoyen's regular co-writer, after she read a newspaper report about two Dutchmen who had moved to northern Spain to begin a new life.⁸ Sorogoyen has described it as the longest creation process of his career: the pair discovered the underlying story in 2015 and began writing in 2016, intending it as their next film after May God Save Us (2016), but the projects The Realm (2018), Mother (2019), and the series Antidisturbios intervened. They used the delays to keep rewriting, reaching the final version in 2020 and shooting in 2021.⁹

The film is a co-production of Spain and France, produced by Arcadia Motion Pictures, Caballo Films, Cronos Entertainment, and Le Pacte, with RTVE, Movistar Plus+, Canal+, and Ciné+ among the backers.¹⁰ The creative team reunited Sorogoyen's long-standing collaborators: cinematographer Álex de Pablo, editor Alberto del Campo, and composer Olivier Arson.¹ Sorogoyen has said he first offered the role of Antoine to Javier Bardem, who declined it; the part then went to Denis Ménochet.¹¹

Reception and awards

The film won the City of Donostia Audience Award for Best European Film at the 2022 San Sebastián Film Festival⁵ and took Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor at the 2022 Tokyo International Film Festival.¹² At the 2023 Goya Awards it received 17 nominations and won nine prizes, the most for any single Spanish film of that awards year: Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Ménochet), Best Supporting Actor (Zahera), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound.^{3 • 13} It also won the César Award for Best Foreign Film in France.¹³ Spain's entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film that year went instead to Carla Simón's Alcarràs.¹⁴

French critics responded strongly: AlloCiné recorded an average press rating of 4.2 out of 5 across 37 reviews, with several commentators arguing the film deserved a place in the Cannes main competition rather than the Première sidebar.^{15 • 16} Reviewers repeatedly noted the way the film builds asphyxiating tension from conversation and atmosphere rather than overt effects, and compared its depiction of rural menace to 1970s films such as Deliverance and Straw Dogs.^{17 • 18}

Themes and debate

The film engages with class conflict, depopulation of rural Spain, xenophobia toward newcomers, and the divide between modern and traditional ways of life.¹⁹ Its screenplay resists a simple division of victims and perpetrators, presenting the wind-farm dispute as a conflict in which both sides have defensible interests: the newcomers want to preserve the landscape they chose, while many locals, who have struggled for generations, stand to gain financially.⁷

The portrayal has also drawn criticism. An academic study of the film argues that it reinstates a binary view of intellectually feeble Galician natives versus an urban, civilized French couple, echoing old stereotypes of rural irrationality.²⁰ Sorogoyen himself opposes wind farms of the kind depicted: in his Goya acceptance speech he said "energía eólica sí, pero no así," referring to the central government's plan for four wind-energy parks in the Sabucedo mountains of Galicia, habitat of the last wild horses in Western Europe.²⁰

References

1. The Beasts (As bestas) – Cineuropa
2. AS BESTAS – Festival de Cannes
3. As bestas – Premios Goya
4. As Bestas – Caballo Films
5. The Beasts (2022) – AFI Silver Theatre
6. As bestas – La crítica de SensaCine
7. The Beasts (As Bestas) – Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
8. 'As Bestas', claves de su éxito e historia real – RTVE
9. AS BESTAS rueda: Las bestias de Sitges – Diario de Venusville
10. As bestas press kit – Golem Distribución
11. Javier Bardem rechazó protagonizar 'As Bestas' – Cadena SER
12. 14th Bengaluru International Film Festival catalogue
13. As Bestas – European Screen
14. 'As Bestas' se queda en el camino hacia Hollywood – Cadena SER
15. Critiques presse pour le film As bestas – AlloCiné
16. Critique – AS BESTAS – Abus de Ciné
17. Críticas de prensa para la película As bestas – SensaCine
18. Críticas profesionales de Las bestias – FilmAffinity
19. At the edge of Europe: film As bestas – The Catcher in the Sand
20. The Male Return to the Countryside in Spanish Culture – Taylor & Francis

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2020–2022 films › Released in 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

© 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Developers: read Edgepedia by API or MCP. Embed a reference card.