[5][6] It follows a married French couple (Ménochet and Foïs) settled in the Galician countryside, exploring issues of xenophobia and escalating hostility between neighbors buoyed by a conflict vis-à-vis a wind farm project, arriving to a point of no return.

Set in the Galician countryside, the story follows a French couple (Antoine and Olga Denis) settled in a small village seeking to connect with nature, growing and selling their own eco-friendly crops and rehabilitating abandoned properties so they can be reinhabited.

However their presence arouses hostility from a couple of neighbors,[7][8] the Anta brothers Xan (an inflexible man used to interacting under a might makes right worldview) and Lorenzo (with reduced mental capacity in the wake of an accident he suffered when he was young),[9] pitted against the French at the opposing side of a dispute regarding the sale of land to a wind energy company.

Antoine reports the hostile behaviour of the Anta brothers, such as trespassing on his farm and urinating on his property, to the local Guardia Civil, but they do not take his concerns seriously, insisting they should solve their dispute through dialogue.

Driving along a country road at night, Antoine and Olga find the path blocked by the brothers' vehicle; the Antas approach the couple with a shotgun and repeatedly bang on the window.

Antoine meets the brothers in the local pub and explains that, if another vote found him to be the only resident opposed to the deal, he would accept the majority opinion and leave the village.

[8] The production crew also features other Sorogoyen's recurring collaborators (such as Olivier Arson as composer, Alex de Pablo as director of cinematography and Alberto del Campo as film editor).

The site's critics consensus reads, "Rodrigo Sorogoyen throws us into rural Galicia with The Beasts, where tension and unease spread like wildfire in a scorching tale of decayed human nature".

[33] Wendy Ide of ScreenDaily deemed the film to be "a terrific psychological thriller and a brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking which makes the most of both the Galician backdrop and the imposing physicality of Menochet and, as his nemesis Xan, the remarkable Luis Zahera.

[28] Raquel Hernández Luján of HobbyConsolas rated The Beasts with 85 points ("very good"), highlighting the tension throughout its first hour as well as the performances by Ménochet, Foïs, and Zahera as the film's standouts.

[35] Eric Ortiz García of ScreenAnarchy assessed that the film "stands out for its accomplished sequences of mundane tension in crescendo and for the complex background of the conflict".