Here is a fierce, bitter tale with a flinty sharpness: partly a social-realist drama of class and xenophobia, and partly a rural noir horror, a Euro-arthouse twist on Straw Dogs or Deliverance. It’s inspired by the true story from 2010 of a middle-class hippy idealist Dutch couple who attempted to settle in the Spanish village of Santoalla in Galicia’s remote “wild west” and fell out badly with their neighbours over their gentrification plans: a row that escalated into a nightmare. It has in fact already been the subject of a documentary, Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s Santoalla, and has now been fictionalised by film-maker Rodrigo Sorogoyen.
Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs play Antoine and Olga, an educated French couple who have moved into the area with big plans to revitalise and modernise its farming techniques. But this film doesn’t give us the gradual deterioration of their relations with the neighbours. As the story begins, they have already infuriated these people irretrievably by vetoing a communal plan to sell out to a wind-turbine company (an issue interestingly also aired in Carla Simon’s film Alcarràs). It was a one-off chance for easy money that local people wanted to grab, tiring of a lifetime of farming toil and angered by these high-handed foreigners airily telling them they’ve been doing it wrong.
