Too Many Beasts

New Showbiz Analysis

The film opens in the French countryside, where wild boars ravage crops and spark a war between farmers and a gentlemen’s hunting club. This premise frames the conflict as a clash between economic desperation and aristocratic leisure, with Brun, a bankrupt farmer, as the tragic figure who shoots the club president and vanishes. A year later, Fulda, a volatile police officer recently transferred to the region, leads the investigation. His personal struggle with a recent breakup mirrors the region’s chaotic state, pushing him to the brink of sanity as the boars proliferate. The sold meaning is a critique of traditional rural hierarchies. The hunting club is portrayed as an empty, violent institution, while the police officer represents the modern, secular authority tasked with resolving the chaos. The film’s argument rests on the idea that these old codes of masculinity and land ownership are unsustainable, leading to criminality and madness. However, the narrative relies heavily on male incompetence and emotional instability as the primary drivers of the plot. Fulda’s volatility and Brun’s bankruptcy are treated as the central problems, with the resolution implied to come through legal and procedural order rather than a deeper social reckoning. The ending, implied by the investigation’s conclusion, likely reinforces the primacy of the state over local custom. The camera loves the tension of the rural landscape, using the boars as a metaphor for the unchecked desires of the old guard. Yet, the film’s internal logic is thin, as it reduces complex socioeconomic issues to a simple binary of law versus chaos. The last image, presumably of Fulda closing the case, settles the moral verdict in favor of institutional stability, leaving the underlying tensions of the countryside unresolved.