Sorogoyen talks about Westerns, genre-bending, an ‘archaic’ film style, and Spain’s spectacular Rapa das Bestas.
From the 100-second tracking shot to building pulse music that opens “The Realm” to the slug-fest finale of “May God Save Us,” Oscar-nominated Rodrigo Sorogoyen (“Mother”) has filmed some of the most exhilarating shots in recent Spanish cinema. His status as a filmmaker consolidated by a series, Movistar Plus’ “Riot Police,” “The Beasts” (“As Bestas”), which plays in Cannes Premiere, rates as one of, if not the most awaited Spanish movie of 2022. From a brief synopsis, it might look like a return to one of Sorogoyen’s central obsessions: Violence. But that is most likely a half truth. Based on real-life events, “The Beasts,” written by Sorogoyen and co-scribe Isabel Peña, follows a married couple, Vincent and Olga, (Denis Menochet and Marina Fois) who have settled in a small village in Galicia, in Spain’s verdant North-West. They grow vegetables and rehabilitate abandoned cottages. Disrupting established village power structures, however, their presence is resented, especially by brothers Xan and Lorenzo. When the couple refuses to endorse a wind farm which would mean a windfall for the villagers, tensions rise to a point of no return. Sorogoyen’s supposed works about violence are all really rather different propositions, however.
