What is natural is not safe – Newspaper Kommersant No. 18 (7463) dated 02/01/2023

Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s film “Predators” (As Bestas), which premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, is being released. The unhurried tense drama tells about the eternal confrontation between two different worlds, but at the same time accurately captures the spirit of the current split into parts of time, believes Yulia Shagelman.

The picture opens with a visual epigraph – shots of the traditional festival of Rapa das Bestas, which is held in Galicia, in northern Spain. During the three days that this action usually continues, wild horses are caught in the mountains, branded, their manes cut off and released again, while no devices can be used to tame violent animals, everything is done with bare hands. In how harshly and expressively the director shows all this, one can see both the admiration of the city dweller (Sorogoyen was born in Madrid) for “wild people, the children of the mountains”, and the fear that their violent customs cause in him, and a gloomy warning. In these parts, where a person lives seemingly in harmony with nature, but in fact – in an endless struggle with it, those who have not learned the rules of the game from childhood risk being trampled to death.

It was precisely such a stranger, full of good intentions, but not quite oriented in the local coordinate system, that the Frenchman Antoine (Denis Menoche) appeared in a half-abandoned Galician village. A retired university professor, having traveled all over the world, he found his own paradise here, and therefore left a comfortable life in his homeland, learned Spanish and moved with his wife Olga (Marina Fois) to the mountains to live a subsistence economy, breathe clean air and enjoy the scenery. In addition to growing organic tomatoes, Antoine restores crumbling houses at his own expense in the hope that wealthy downshifters like him will buy them, people will return to the village and it will come to life again.

Alas, although the couple even found a friend among the locals, the shepherd Pepino (Jose Manuel Fernandez and Blanco), the majority meets them at best indifferently, and at worst with hostility. At the beginning of the film, we catch a scene, as if filmed with a hidden camera of a documentary filmmaker: men are sitting in a bar, drinking, playing dominoes, discussing some of their business. The Frenchman (otherwise no one addresses him, emphasizing his foreignness) is included in this circle only as an object of ridicule, in which San (Luis Saera) is especially zealous, inciting his younger brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) – the guy was once hit with a hoof on the head of a horse, so he thinks hard, but faithfully looks into the mouth of the elder and is ready to follow him in everything.

It gradually turns out that the conflict between San, who is forcing him more and more, and Antoine, who has been trying to evade direct confrontation for some time, is based not only on the fact that one Spaniard and the other French, one local, and the other “come in large numbers”, one simple a peasant from a plow, and the second is an intellectual with a higher education. It also has a very practical aspect. Sun and his fellow villagers do not share Antoine’s bucolic dreams of a simple life on earth: all they want is to run away from this earth to city goods and conveniences, and this can be done with the money offered to the villagers by the Norwegian energy company, if they unanimously decide to sell their plots and pastures for the construction of wind turbines. In vain Antoine, whose struggle with windmills, and even in Spain, of course, brings to mind Don Quixote and his mills, proves that this “clean energy” is not so clean and will ruin the local ecosystem. He and three others whom he managed to convince, in the eyes of Sun, stand between him and a prosperous life in the city.

The film, which is more suitable not for the Russian rental title, but for the original one, “The Beasts”, is clearly divided into two parts. The first, which spins a tight, unrelenting spiral of mutual violence, refers to such classic paintings of the abyss between inside and outside, savagery and enlightenment, the voice of blood and the voice of reason, such as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) or Deliverance. John Boorman (1972). But, a little over the middle, the film seems to break with a crunch, like a dry branch, the frenzied male ego is replaced by a quiet, but unbending female perseverance, and the main character becomes Olga, who had previously kept in her husband’s shadow. The story of cruelty and revenge becomes a story of justice and – no, not forgiveness, but acceptance and redemption, which, however, should not be confused with oblivion.