Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by Monica Castillo
There’s a moment early in Too Many Beasts where a hunter is asked about the wild boar overpopulation crisis threatening the entire region, a crisis that has, by this point, already led to at least one murder and his response, delivered with complete sincerity, is that he will not be putting condoms on them. The entire theatre laughed. I laughed, and in that moment I knew exactly what kind of film Sarah Arnold had made, and that I was completely on board for wherever it was going.
That’s the thing about Too Many Beasts, The tone is locked in from the very first scene, a prologue in which a gamekeeper named Brun (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) shoots a landowner dead for the deeply principled reason that the man had been overfeeding the local boars and letting them run wild. It’s played straight. It’s also very funny. And once you’ve accepted that this film will treat murder with the same matter-of-fact deadpan it applies to everything else, you’re free to just enjoy the ride.
The story Arnold is telling is, at its core, a familiar one small-town corruption, money doing what money does, and the few stubborn holdouts who haven’t been bought. A cop named Fulda (Alexis Manenti) gets transferred into a rural community that’s fracturing along old fault lines: local hunters furious that wealthy outsiders are muscling into their territory, farmers watching their crops get destroyed by a boar population that seems to double every few weeks, and a political class quietly profiting from all of it. There’s a conspiracy to fatten up the livestock so that rich clients can hunt in comfort. People are angry. Boar carcasses are appearing in inconvenient places. And somewhere out there, Brun may or may not have resurfaced.
What makes Fulda worth following isn’t that he’s a great detective he’s genuinely a bit of a disaster. He stumbles, he misjudges, he says the wrong thing at the wrong moment. But he cares, in that stubborn, slightly ridiculous way that good people in bad situations tend to. Manenti plays him beautifully there’s a sincerity underneath all the fumbling that you can’t help but root for. His unlikely partner is Stéphane, a psychologist played by Ella Rumpf, who is competent and sharp and visibly one bad day away from completely losing it. She’s foul-mouthed, chronically impatient, and exactly the kind of person you’d want in your corner if things went sideways. Together they have this fire-and-ice chemistry that’s partly romantic tension and partly two people who’ve independently decided the whole town is rotten and they’re not going to pretend otherwise. Watching them figure each other out while the plot gets progressively weirder around them is genuinely one of the more enjoyable things I’ve seen at this festival.
Arnold’s sense of humor runs all the way through the film without ever tipping into parody. When Fulda’s partner balks at Brun’s violence “He gutted a man!” Fulda considers this for a moment and responds, “Sure, but with respect.” It’s a perfect line, and the delivery makes it even better, because nobody in this film plays it for the joke. They all just live in it. That commitment to the bit, from every actor on screen, is what keeps the comedy from undercutting the tension. You can be genuinely unsure what’s going to happen next and still be smiling.
Cinematographer Noé Bach is doing something quietly clever with all of this. He keeps pulling the camera back to remind you how small the humans actually are wide, open shots of the landscape that put all this rural posturing in brutal perspective. And then he’ll cut to a close-up of a boar unhurried, unimpressed, just existing framed with the same intimacy you’d usually reserve for a lead actor. It’s funny, but it’s also the whole argument the film is making. These animals have been here longer than the guns, the hunting clubs, the political scandals. They’ll be here after all of it. The humans are the disruption.
That’s where Too Many Beasts quietly earns something more than its premise promised. What starts as a crime comedy with an unusual mascot becomes, without ever getting preachy about it, a film about how capitalism turns people against each other and against the world they actually live in. It’s there in the background, in the way the boar population has been deliberately manipulated for profit, in the way the traditional hunters have been priced out of something they built their identities around. Arnold doesn’t stop the film to lecture you about any of this. She just keeps cutting back to the boars, peacefully going about their business while the humans spiral, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
The pacing loosens slightly as the conspiracy layers pile on in the third act the plot earns a bit more complexity than it entirely needs but by then you’re far enough in that you’d follow these two anywhere. Too Many Beasts took the Europa Cinema Label here at Cannes, and it deserves the wider theatrical push that comes with it. This is a film that works in an arthouse and would work just as well at a packed multiplex on a Friday night. It’s funny, it’s sharp, it’s got two lead performances you’ll be thinking about after you leave, and it has more to say about nature, greed, and the limits of human arrogance than most films twice its ambition.
Go see it on the biggest screen you can find. The boars deserve it.
Parental Guidance Too Many Beasts
Violence & Intensity: Moderate-High. A murder happens in the opening scene with little fanfare — that’s the tone. A character being “gutted” is referenced explicitly in dialogue and played, deliberately, for dark laughs. Animal carcasses appear as recurring plot devices. There’s an undercurrent of rural menace throughout, and the factional conflict between hunters and farmers carries real stakes. It’s not graphic in a gore sense, but the violence is present, treated casually, and central to the story.
Language: Moderate. The film is in French with subtitles. At least one lead character is described by critics as “foul-mouthed.” Dialogue is blunt and adult throughout, with crude humor involving violence and crude subject matter (the condom-and-boar joke is the most printable example). No extreme slurs confirmed, but the register is consistently adult.
Sexual Content / Nudity: Mild. Clear romantic and sexual tension between the two leads. “Sexual frustration” is flagged as a recurring undercurrent by multiple critics. No explicit scenes or nudity reported from any review.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Mild. Rural French setting makes social drinking very likely. No drug use or heavy alcohol abuse has been noted in any review coverage.
