Substantiating vulnerability in As bestas (2022): a political neo-noir encounter between insiders and outsiders in rural Spain

This paper delineates how neo-noir Spanish cinema is adopting enigmatic narratives to represent the grim rural realities of Galicia’s small village as symbolic political and economic struggles that strengthen in conjunctures of crisis. Analyzing Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As Bestas (2022) (The Beasts) as a paradigmatic case, this study fosters the notion of rural noir through an exploration of the vulnerability of global and local bodies. In doing so, we claim that the film turns into a political neo-noir whose filmic discourse outlines the enduring and vulnerable aspects that move beyond the everlasting crisis of the psychopath. By leveraging Judith Butler’s (2004) theoretical construct of ‘vulnerability’, we map out the film’s non-dualistic eco-aesthetic and auteurist representational methods that transform vicarious violence into eco-love, grief, and duelling. More precisely, the shared spatial experience of affections and emotions generates an avenue where an excess of masculine values and patriarchal norms are refused to give way to a sense of community entrenched in vulnerability, intrinsic to democratic scarcity and the human condition.