Like an appendectomy with no anesthesia, it feels good when it's over and thank God you only have to do it once.

As Bestas (The Beasts) is a Franco-Spanish thriller that starts off tense and relentlessly turns the screws ever so tightly until you're begging the movie to just fucking kill you or let you go.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen directed this on razor wire with absolutely no missteps and the result is a suspense that feels more like a horror movie than any horror movie I've seen this year.

Because The Beasts is billed as a rural thriller, but it feels more like a horror film because the real horrors in life are the horrible acts people are capable of committing against one another, and how easy it is for them to get away with it.

From the beginning, we know that the disagreement between two Spanish brothers in a rural village and the French couple who has chosen to retire on a small farm next door is going to escalate, but the intensity of the decline and the excruciatingly slow pace of the decay is mentally and physically exhausting. By the time the film had ended, I was shook.

The change of focus between the 2nd and 3rd acts is a little abrupt, but in the end does little to detract from this impressive film you'll want to run out and recommend as soon as you're glad it's over.