Original, Gripping Rural French Crime Comedy

Both the deadpan thrillers of the Coen brothers and the downbeat ‘70s crime flicks of French helmer Alain Corneau come to mind when watching Too Many Beasts (L’espèce explosive), a promising first feature from director Sarah Arnold that finds clever new ways to tell a familiar story of crooked cops and small-town corruption.

What sets this slickly helmed, darkly funny debut apart from other entries to the genre is Arnold’s unusual blend of wildlife, agrarian strife, sexual frustration and longstanding regional feuds, which in this case involve the gentrification of one of France’s oldest pastimes: game hunting. Set in the lush forests and fields of the northeast, the story depicts a gory factional war between hunters and farmers, have and have-nots, with one depressed fish-out-of-water gendarme caught in the middle.

That gendarme is deliciously played by Alexis Manenti, who’s become one of the most consistently compelling new actors in French arthouse cinema. (He’s also headlining the gay trucker romance Flesh and Fuel, which premiered in Cannes‘ Critics’ Week. Beasts premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight.)

Mananeti portrays Fulda, a Corsican cop with a funny German name who finds himself plunged into a conflict that began brewing a year before he rolls into town. As seen in a blood-soaked and boar-filled prologue, the hostilities involve a militant farmer (Pascal Rénéric), a slimy mayor (Thierry Godard) and a nutsy gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) who blows his neighbor away with a shotgun in the opening scene.  

Arnold, who penned the script with four other writers, keeps these events purposely murky for much of the running time, to the point that we never quite know who’s on the right side of the law. Nor do we know if the law itself, represented by Fulda’s scheming partner (Vincent Dedienne) and dubious captain (Bertrand Belin), can be trusted, leaving the gendarme to solve the murder on his own.

He soon finds an unlikely sidekick in Stéphane (the excellent Ella Rumpf), a police psychologist who’s been sent to help the state troopers deal with the crime spree, which ramps up when animal carcasses begin appearing all over town. At first, Fulda is fully resistant to Stéphane’s inquiries, which involve personal and professional blowups that happened when he was back in Corsica. The guy clearly has anger issues — but so, we learn, does Stéphane, who was arrested for a road rage incident in Paris.

The two eventually start working side-by-side, which may seem far-fetched at first, although Arnold’s skillful plotting and wicked sense of humor never make us question the plausability of what’s happening, nor all the oddbal behavior we witness. Her film is much more Fargo than No Country for Old Men, so much does it revel in the idiosyncrasies of its two troubled protagonists, not to mention a rural enclave where people do lots of strange things and nobody can be fully trusted.

The director lends an epic quality to all the bizarre happenings, using overhead tracking shots — courtesy of DP Noé Bach (Animalia) — to frame Fulda and Stéphane against lush green pastures teeming with wildlife. A racing, dissonant score by Florencia Di Concilio ups the tension but never undercuts the humor, which boils over during a finale involving live ammunition and the delirious effects of liquid meth.

What’s most impressive about Two Many Beasts is how crazy and contained it feels at the same time. As absurd as the story is, Arnold always grounds it in the trajectories of her unlikely heroes, who grow closer as the plot thickens, or rather, unravels. Fulda may be slightly out of his mind; his investigative instincts nonetheless crack open a case no one else can solve. But he also needs Stéphane’s guidance and intellect to keep him from sliding off track, making her a perfect accomplice to his crime-fighting.

Of all the wild twists in Arnold’s debut, the hardest one to predict is how the film somehow blossoms into a would-be romance between two people taking on an enemy that’s all around them, as well as within them. There are indeed too many beasts in the movie for Fulda and Stéphane to tame, which is why it could only end with a boldly affectionate gesture in which they wind up taming one another.