Sorogoyen is a master of the long take. The film’s infamous ten-minute argument at the village bar plays out in a single, stifling wide shot. We are forced to watch Antoine’s humiliation in real-time, unable to look away as the community’s passive aggression curdles into direct threat. Later, a nighttime chase through a cornfield utilizes disorienting POV shots, turning the familiar rural landscape into a labyrinth.
Yet, the film forces us to look at Antoine. Is his stubborn idealism a form of monstrosity? He claims to be defending the landscape, but he is willing to sacrifice the economic well-being of an entire village for his principles. He refuses to compromise, to negotiate, or to leave. In the context of the community, his sainthood looks like arrogance. Sorogoyen refuses to pick a side. The beasts are not the brothers; the beast is the situation itself—a zero-sum game where empathy dies. Rodrigo Sorogoyen, working with cinematographer Alex de Pablo, shoots Galicia as a character in its own right. Unlike the postcard-perfect green of travelogues, the Galicia of As Bestas is oppressive. The fog sits heavy like a wet blanket. The forests are tangled and impenetrable. At night, the darkness is absolute, swallowing headlights and footsteps.
In a stunning sequence, Olga walks into the local municipal office and, in perfectly articulated Galician (a dialect she previously struggled with), systematically dismantles the brothers' alibi. The final confrontation is not a shootout in a barn, but a wiretap in a police station. Sorogoyen suggests that civilization’s most powerful weapon isn’t brutality—it is patience and intelligence. The ending is ambiguous, gut-wrenching, and deeply satisfying in its moral complexity. As Bestas cannot be separated from the socio-political reality of "La España Vacía" (Empty Spain). For decades, Spanish political and economic life has centered on Madrid and Barcelona, leaving rural provinces—especially Galicia, Aragon, and Castile—to depopulate and decay.
Enter the Anta brothers: Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido). These are the "beasts" of the title—crude, muscular, and deeply embedded in the land’s identity. Xan, the more volatile of the two, views Antoine’s refusal not as a political stance, but as a declaration of war. To Xan, Antoine is a foreign parasite stopping the village’s only chance at prosperity.
A lucrative deal is on the table. The villagers, struggling with depopulation and an aging demographic, stand to make millions by leasing their land for industrial wind turbines. But Antoine and Olga’s plot is a strategic bottleneck. Without their signature, the entire project collapses.
As Bestas asks a brutal question: If someone is starving, how much moral authority does a well-fed person have to tell them they cannot eat?