‘Too Many Beasts’ Cannes Review: A French Noir Comedy That Goes Gloriously Off the Rails

A noir thriller, a detective comedy, a small-town mystery, and an eccentric blend of all three: Too Many Beasts is a genuine surprise — a strange, delightful French film that grows stranger and more delirious with every passing minute. Sarah Arnold’s debut feature starts in relatively familiar territory, the kind of setup that could easily pass for a prestige streaming series, but it gradually warps into something altogether weirder as new characters emerge and the relationships between them take on an increasingly peculiar charge. By the end, it sits much closer to Alain Guiraudie or Bruno Dumont — or David Lynch’s Twin Peaks — than to anything you’d find on Netflix. It’s as extravagant as it is irresistible.

It all begins in a small village in the Argonne region of northern France, where a bitter and increasingly violent conflict has been brewing between local hunters and farmers. The farmers lodge complaints with the authorities and with those who come to hunt in the area, but nobody listens — so one of them takes matters into his own hands, killing a landowner in a particularly brutal fashion before, supposedly, dying himself.

Rather than following that crime into a conventional investigation, the film skips forward an entire year and shifts its attention to the local Gendarmerie, where a certain Fulda (Alexis Manenti) has just arrived on transfer from Corsica, where disciplinary problems and a demotion have preceded him. He’s a tormented figure, sealed off inside his own world; we soon learn his wife has left him — the reasons remain murky — and he’s been drinking his way through the grief ever since.

As a new hunting season gets underway and fresh tensions between hunters and farmers begin to simmer, a psychologist named Stéphane (Ella Rumpf) is assigned to the station. She’s a particular presence in her own right — direct, no-nonsense, and with very little patience for the unit’s macho commanding officer. With Fulda, she develops an odd kind of connection: he has no interest in being psychoanalyzed, especially — given his specific situation — by a woman, but they gradually recognize in each other the same slightly sideways way of reading the world and the people in it.

In the meantime, Fulda sets about trying to untangle not only what became of the mysterious killer from the year before — whose alleged death is looking increasingly suspicious, and who’s rumored to be wandering the area like a ghost or a scavenger, picking off wild boar — but also what exactly is going on behind the scenes among the landowners, the police brass, and the local officials who control the lucrative hunting business.

The case itself eventually becomes secondary, or rather, a pretext for opening ever more unsettling doors in this already strange environment. Some of the farmers, branded eco-terrorists by the authorities for their methods, turn out to be considerably more peculiar than they first appear. And the gendarmes are no less so. At a certain point the unit starts to resemble the cast of The Office or Brooklyn Nine-Nine more than any serious law enforcement body. And the most extreme of all is Fulda himself, who reaches conclusions by the most outlandish methods imaginable and always seems to be one step away from either violence or some spectacular act of weirdness — a working-class version of Agent Cooper, essentially.

The film’s best passages belong to the relationship between Fulda and Stéphane, two people who are genuinely unusual in their respective fields and who build something between them that begins in friction and ends somewhere far more interesting. At some point — to return to the Netflix comparison — the film could easily sustain itself as a series following the investigations of this bizarre little unit. But Arnold prefers to push the eccentricity as far as it will go and commit fully to comedy, including an extended «investigation» sequence conducted by both of them while completely high.

Without abandoning the thriller mechanics entirely, Arnold places her bets on her cast and on what her actors manage to do with each other. Manenti is exceptional at building a character who seems to inhabit his own private planet — capable of a moment of genuine insight, then an absurd one, then a flash of violence, almost in sequence. And Rumpf more than holds her own as this foul-mouthed, chronically impatient psychologist who slowly begins to realize that Fulda has something different to offer. Dark and light at once, Too Many Beasts is as extravagant as it is wildly entertaining.