Director Sarah Arnold, abetted by terrific turns from Alexis Manenti and Ella Rumpf, exerts masterful control over the escalating chaos and mounting pig carcasses of her funny, weird, deadpan-deranged debut.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of 5A7, Cannes Film Festival There’s been something sinister afoot in provincial France in recent years. Inbred eccentrics and bumbling detectives have populated the seaside villages of Bruno Dumont’s absurdist comedies. Seedy psychosexual drama has leached into the soil of Alain Guiraudie’s farmlands and forest towns, causing poisonous little love triangles to bloom like the wild mushrooms of his “Misericordia.” And now first-time feature director Sarah Arnold takes a run at this new tradition with the careening energy of a herd of squealing boars, to deliver the hog-wild and wonderful “Too Many Beasts,” in which a standoff between hunters and farmers leads to increasingly loopy shenanigans in a small French town called, in all seriousness, Sérieux. “Jean de Florette” it ain’t.
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