What The Beasts is Really About
The story of The Beasts unfolds in the Spanish countryside, where Olga and Antoine—a French couple with genuine ideals and genuine privilege—have relocated to start an organic farm. They're earnest about sustainability, about living off the land the right way. But their arrival in this small, insular community doesn't feel like a fresh start to everyone. For the locals—families who've worked this soil for generations, who've scraped by on far less romantic terms—the couple's eco-conscious enthusiasm reads as something else entirely: a kind of patronizing intrusion. The film doesn't rush to pick sides. Instead, it lets tension accumulate. Neighbors Xan and Loren have their own plans for the land, plans that involve a wind turbine company and a payday. When the French couple's vision for the future clashes with the locals' immediate financial needs, the friction becomes something harder to ignore. What starts as cold shoulders and muttered comments threatens to boil over into something far more volatile.
Behind the Making of The Beasts and Its Critical Ascent
The Beasts is a Spanish-French co-production directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Isabel Peña. The film premiered in 2022 and has since become one of those rare international thrillers that critics and audiences can actually agree on—it holds a 99% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metascore of 85, suggesting the kind of consensus that doesn't come around often. The ensemble cast brings serious weight to the material. Denis Ménochet (Antoine) and Marina Foïs (Olga) carry the film's emotional core, while Luis Zahera's turn as Xan is the kind of performance that makes you understand why someone might resent you without excusing their behavior. The supporting cast—Diego Anido, Marie Colomb, Machi Salgado, David Menéndez—fills out a community that feels lived-in, real, and genuinely hostile.
The film clocked a modest box office return of $46,105, which tells you something about its distribution reach, but its award recognition tells a different story: 58 wins and 40 nominations across the festival circuit. It's the kind of film that plays better in competition than at the multiplex, and that's by design. At 138 minutes, Sorogoyen takes his time. He's not interested in quick resolutions or tidy moral judgments. The dialogue shifts between Spanish, French, and Galician—a linguistic reality that itself becomes a barrier, a way the film embeds language as part of the problem. When you're watching it on Movie OTT, which tracks streaming availability across platforms, you're signing up for something that demands patience and attention.
Why The Beasts Works as Both Thriller and Social Commentary
Honestly, what's most striking about The Beasts is how it refuses to make the locals into cartoon villains or the French couple into martyrs. That's the tightrope Sorogoyen walks, and he doesn't fall off. The tension in the film isn't manufactured—it grows from real material conditions, from the fact that these communities want different things and have incompatible timelines. Xan and Loren need money now. Olga and Antoine are thinking about the earth's future. Neither is wrong, exactly, but their visions can't coexist on the same piece of land.
What makes the film genuinely unsettling is that you can see how resentment accumulates. Small slights compound. A refusal to attend a town gathering. A misunderstanding about water rights. The way the couple's organic methods might accidentally suggest that the locals' traditional farming was somehow wrong or destructive. None of these moments alone would break a community, but stacked on top of each other—and stacked on top of decades of economic precarity and the feeling of being left behind—they become combustible. Foïs and Ménochet are particularly good at playing people who mean well but whose good intentions carry an undertone of condescension they don't even recognize. That's harder to pull off than playing outright villains.
The performances anchor what could've been a heavy-handed parable about class conflict, turning it instead into something more ambiguous and human. Movie OTT's streaming guides often highlight films that work on multiple levels, and this one definitely qualifies—you can watch it as a thriller, as social critique, or as a character study of how strangers fail to understand each other.
Where to Stream The Beasts Online
The Beasts is currently available on Disney+, which means it's accessible to millions of subscribers looking for something beyond the usual blockbuster fare. The platform's algorithm probably won't surface it as readily as it does Marvel films, so you might need to search for it directly—which is worth doing. If you're using Movie OTT to check where titles are streaming, you'll see the full picture of current availability across services in the widget at the top of this page. Disney+ carries the film in multiple languages and with subtitles, so you can watch it in its original multilingual soundtrack or dubbed, depending on your preference.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Who directed The Beasts and what else has he made? Rodrigo Sorogoyen directed The Beasts and co-wrote it with Isabel Peña. He's known for character-driven thrillers that explore social friction and moral ambiguity, bringing a deliberate, patient approach to storytelling that lets tension build naturally rather than relying on cheap scares.
Q: Is The Beasts based on a true story? No, The Beasts is an original screenplay, though it's rooted in real conflicts that occur in rural communities worldwide—the clash between newcomers with different values and long-established residents protecting their livelihoods and way of life.
Q: How long is The Beasts and what's the runtime? The Beasts runs 138 minutes, so it's not a quick watch. Sorogoyen uses that time to let scenes breathe and tension accumulate organically, which is part of why the film's climax lands with such force.
Q: What languages is The Beasts in? The film features dialogue in Spanish, French, and Galician, reflecting the authentic linguistic landscape of the region where it's set. This multilingual approach reinforces themes of outsiders and insiders, communication and misunderstanding.
Q: How critically acclaimed is The Beasts? The Beasts holds a 99% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 85 Metascore, with 58 wins across major festivals. The IMDb rating of 7.5 from nearly 25,000 votes suggests it's a film that works for both critics and general audiences, though it's definitely more of an art-house thriller than a crowd-pleaser.
Final Thoughts on The Beasts
If you're tired of thrillers that wrap everything up with a bow and a clear moral winner, The Beasts offers something harder and more honest. It won't comfort you. It'll sit with you after the credits roll, making you question whether you'd have handled things differently—and whether the locals were really wrong to feel threatened. That's the mark of a film that trusts its audience to sit with ambiguity. It's worth your time.
