‘Too Many Beasts’ movie review: Hunting season is open in this surprisingly offbeat French crime thriller

Both the deadpan thrillers of the Coen brothers and the downbeat 1970s crime films of French director Alain Cornu come to mind when watching them. Lots of monsters (Explosive personality), a promising first film from director Sarah Arnold, which finds clever new ways to tell a familiar story about crooked cops and small-town corruption.

What sets this darkly funny debut apart from other entries to the genre is Arnold’s unusual mix of wildlife and agricultural conflict, sexual frustration and long-standing territorial disputes, which in this case involves improving one of France’s oldest pastimes: game hunting. Set in the forests and green fields of the Northeast, the story depicts a bloody war between fishermen and farmers, the haves and the have-nots, with a depressed out-of-water cop caught in the middle.

This gendarme is superbly played by Alexis Manenti, who has become one of the most consistently convincing new actors in French art cinema. (He also headlines the truck driver’s gay romance Meat and fuelwhich premiered at Critics’ Week in Cannes. Monsters It premiered at Directors’ Fortnight.)

Magnetti portrays Fulda, a Corsican policeman with a funny German name who finds himself embroiled in a conflict that began brewing a year before his arrival in the city. As seen in the blood-soaked, pig-filled prologue, the hostilities include a hardened farmer (Pascal Renric), a slimy mayor (Thierry Godard), and a crazed gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coloquet) who blows up his neighbor with a shotgun in the opening scene.

Arnold, who wrote the screenplay with four other writers, keeps these events deliberately ambiguous throughout most of the running time, so much so that we never know who is on the right side of the law. We also don’t know if the law itself, represented by Fulda’s scheming partner (Vincent Didian) and questionable captain (Bertrand Belin), can be trusted, leaving the gendarmes to solve the murder on their own.

He soon finds an unexpected friend in Stefan (the excellent Ella Rumpf), a police psychiatrist sent to help state troopers deal with a crime spree, which escalates when animal corpses start showing up all over the city. At first, Fulda is completely resistant to Stefan’s enquiries, which involve personal and professional disagreements that occurred when he returned to Corsica. The man clearly has anger issues, but so does Stephane, who was arrested for a road rage incident in Paris.

The two eventually begin working side by side, which may seem far-fetched at first, though Arnold’s clever plotting and wicked sense of humor never make us question the plausibility of what’s happening, nor about all the antics we’re witnessing. Her film is so much more than that Fargo from There is no country for old menshe takes great pleasure in the idiosyncrasies of her two troubled heroes, not to mention the rural enclave where people do a lot of strange things and no one can be completely trusted.

The director brings an epic quality to all the strange goings-on, using overhead tracking shots – courtesy of DP Noé Bach (Animalia) – to frame Volda and Stefan facing lush green pastures teeming with wildlife. Florencia Di Concilio’s fast-paced, dissonant score builds tension but never diminishes the humor that simmers during a finale involving live ammunition and the delirious effects of liquid meth.

What’s most impressive about… Two monsters It’s how crazy and contained you feel at the same time. Despite the absurdity of the story, Arnold is always grounded in the paths of its unlikely heroes, who grow closer as the plot intensifies, or rather, unfolds. Fulda might be a little out of his mind; However, his investigative instincts open a case that no one can solve. But he also needs Stefan’s guidance and her intelligence to keep him from straying off course, making her an ideal crime-fighting partner.

Of all the wild twists in Arnold’s debut, the hardest to predict is how the film somehow turns into a potential love story between two people facing an enemy all around them, as well as within them. There are already too many monsters in the film that cannot be tamed for Volda and Stefan, which is why the film can only end with a bold gesture of affection that ends up taming each other.