TOO MANY BEASTS (L’ESPÈCE EXPLOSIVE) After Dark

Things go deliriously hog-wild in Swiss-Italian filmmaker Sarah Arnold’s wonderfully unpredictable, delightfully deadpan debut, which won the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film at this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. In a small French town, surrounded by bucolic forests and fields, wild boars are multiplying, crops are being destroyed and an increasingly bitter feud has erupted between farmers and game hunters. After a local farmer (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) is pushed too far by the dispute, he snaps — in gloriously gory fashion — and promptly disappears into the wilderness. A year later, the hostilities have intensified, threatening to boil over into all-out class warfare. The seeming indifference — perhaps complicity — of the local police prompts the case to land on the desk of newly transferred gendarme Fulda Orsini (Alexis Manenti, also in AFI FEST selection FLESH AND FUEL), a fish-out-of-water arriving from his Corsica home under a cloud of controversy. But his investigation quickly gets complicated. The hunters seem to have their own agenda, the farmers have plenty of grudges and rumors are swirling that the local elite may be deliberately feeding the boars to create bigger, better targets for wealthy hunters. Meanwhile, the animals themselves seem to be getting bigger — and considerably harder to control. Fulda soon finds an unlikely ally in fellow transplant Stéphane Danjir (Ella Rumpf), a police psychologist with her own baggage, who’s been sent to help the force process the escalating tensions. As the pair follow the trail of the missing farmer, the multiplying boars and the crumbs of local corruption, they find themselves investigating a case that gets stranger — and considerably more unhinged — with every step. Manenti and Rumpf make a terrific odd couple, sparring their way through the investigation with equal parts irritation and attraction. Part rural noir, part police procedural, part screwball comedy —and entirely its own beast – Arnold’s perfectly calibrated debut has both a wicked sense of humor and a knack for turning provincial politics, small-town corruption and class strife into something gloriously absurd. –Abbie Algar