French director Sarah Arnold’s wild boar-fueled crime thriller Too Many Beasts (L’Espèce explosive) has taken the Europa Cinemas Label award for best European film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the organization unveiled on Thursday.
The prize, awarded for the 23rd time at Cannes, goes to the strongest European title in the Directors’ Fortnight section, and comes with the backing of the Europa Cinemas Network — 3,166 screens across 815 cities in 39 countries — including additional promotional support and exhibitor incentives to extend the film’s theatrical run.
The jury, made up of four exhibitors from the Europa Cinemas Network, praised Arnold’s debut as “a really fresh and original first feature” and “a real genre bender, encompassing action, romance, thriller, comedy and police procedural.” They singled out the film’s unpredictability as a key strength, noting that “the accessible plot consistently takes the audience in totally unexpected directions,” culminating in what they called “a delicious and crazy psychedelic-fueled roller coaster” in its final fifteen minutes.
In his review, Hollywood Reporter critic Jordan Mintzer said the film calls to mind “the deadpan thrillers of the Coen brothers and the downbeat ’70s crime flicks of French helmer Alain Corneau,” while finding “clever new ways to tell a familiar story of crooked cops and small-town corruption.”
In northeastern France, a simmering war between farmers and hunters over a devastating wild boar population explodes into murder, drawing in Fulda (Alexis Manenti), an impulsive Corsican cop and Stéphane (Ella Rumpf), a psychologist sent to help local law enforcement process a violent crime spree. As the two reluctant partners dig deeper, they find themselves unable to trust anyone around them — not the locals, not their colleagues, not even the law itself.
What begins as a darkly comic murder investigation gradually unravels into something far stranger, culminating in a psychedelic finale that is as much about the unlikely bond between its two heroes as it is about the corruption festering at the heart of a small rural community.
The movie, said Mintzer, “is much more Fargo than No Country for Old Men, so much does it revel in the idiosyncrasies of its two troubled protagonists.”
The jury echoed that human warmth in their citation, calling Too Many Beasts “a very human film — subtle and not didactic in any way” in its examination of corruption and community.
Too Many Beasts is Arnold’s feature debut. Playtime is handling international sales.
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