God, you are animals! “Predators”, a hardcore drama about angry people, aired on loan in Russia Review of drama “Predators” with “Bastards” star Denis Menoche 13:54

Antoine (Inglourious Basterds star Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Fois) move from a bustling French metropolis to a quiet Spanish village. In the new location, the heroes try to build a humble farming business that they want to turn into a rural haven for future downshifters.

The land looks attractive not only for newly arrived spouses, but also for wealthy investors: Norwegian businessmen want to buy the land for the construction of their project. The local simple people, born into poverty and destined to die there, vote for the sale of the land, but Antoine and two other daredevils oppose it – they don’t want to give the business magnates what so much effort and hope is invested in. .

Thus, a terrible and cruel confrontation begins between the French couple and the inhabitants of the Spanish hinterland, who ruthlessly reject the intruders. The latter (who dreams of being the first) dehumanizes the visitors, making their lives hell, and now Antoine and Olga have to make a difficult decision: to be like their torturer or try not to let the animal beat the human anyway.

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Frame from the movie “Predators” (2022)

Arcadia Animated Pictures

Antoine, a former teacher, from the first minutes becomes the object of persecution of the local rude people, and the hostility gradually reaches destructive proportions. At first, he tries to defend his innocence by a means familiar to the teacher – in a word, but local simple men, whose faces and hearts are as if carved from stone, ignorant of life outside their native village, understand only one way. communication – the language of violence.

Unable to convince Antoine, they first begin to harm him and then decide to resort to threats, destroying his crop, and if the situation is resolved only by the death of one of the opponents, then the weapon in the hand of the loaded one will win. Antoine has only one video camera in his arsenal, where he records the evidence of bullying collected for the police – finally, the hero hopes to bring justice in a civilized manner, but the system remains deaf and indifferent.

Although the film is based on certain true events (albeit less bloodthirsty), Predators seems from the first minutes a story about the clash of modernization and archaism, the educated and the ignorant, current and nondescript. And the language of this cruelty is also recognizable: it has become an integral part of modern life, and the desire to reciprocate has become a reliable method of revenge.

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Frame from the movie “Predators” (2022)

Arcadia Animated Pictures

Shym from “Casta” has a solo track called “Song about revenge” – a parable about a hero whose life is ruined by a rogue sailor. As an adult, the hero gets a chance to fatefully punish his foe, and this confrontation turns into a terrifying ending for both of them.

Speaking in an interview about the piece with the emotional chorus, “Find it! Translate! Tie him to a pole and break his fingers!”, Shym himself summed up a bleak conclusion – a song about revenge, about the desire for just revenge, evokes perhaps the sharpest and most vivid human response at the band’s concerts.

This example seems like a straight parallel to the plot of Predators, where the characters’ hearts respond most strongly to brute force. The barn and wild savanna shown on screen take on an endless scale of horror. At the same time, the film itself is viscous, like a swamp into which Antoine is drawn. The air is compressed, the walls are compressed – and it seems that a little more and the sky itself will fall on the heads of the heroes.

Therefore, the first hour of the picture turns out to be the most brutal – the viewer has nothing to rely on to breathe, nowhere to hide from the terrible stream of evil, only increasing in size.

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Frame from the movie “Predators” (2022)

Arcadia Animated Pictures

The closest witness to the inevitable end is Olga, the wife of the protagonist, to whom the last part of the story is dedicated. Clever Antoine is at one point upset and resentful, while Olga refuses to be ruled by animalistic emotions. With almost biblical humility, he still looks after his beds and sheep every day (a frontal but appropriate symbol in this story), tirelessly tilling his field and reaping exactly what he has sown.

This meekness and quiet daily work help him get what he wants, even at the expense of the irreversibility of his grief. But it seems that the movement of evil in the world of “Predators” has finally stopped.