Vlissingen 2026 Review: TOO MANY BEASTS Delightfully Zigs And Zags

A few minutes into Sarah Arnold's debut film Too Many Beasts I was wondering if the booklet of Vlissingen's Film by the Sea Festival had been misprinted. A comedy? This? Judging from the gore, lighting, music and ehm... bodycount, I was still deciding whether this was going to be a creature feature or a serial killer thriller. And the next few minutes didn't exactly make things easier, with our protagonist being a decidedly unsympathetic mentally broken policeman drunkenly stalking his ex. But as the narrative starts to develop, the fun starts too, just when you as a viewer catch on to what the hell is happening.

We follow Fulda, who starts working in a rural village on the French mainland. Demoted after a violent incident and moved from Corsica to his current assignment, Fulda struggles with fitting in, while still prone to the mood shifts that got him into trouble in the first place. Worse: by court order, Fulda needs to check in with a therapist every few days, and she is a woman. The team he's now part of consists of a bunch of losers and the village is a battleground between angry farmers and the rich aristocracy. Wild boars destroy the farmer's harvest while the local government feed the animals on purpose, so they grow big and attractive for hunting.

Fulda, wallowing in self-pity, doesn't care much for all that, but his expertise in research scores him some easy wins and even allows for some cold cases to be reopened. This includes a missing murderer, rumored to be living off the land as a vagrant, who seems to be warning people of an impending murder spree. Meanwhile, there are some strange things happening with the boars. As Fulda, helped by his irritated therapist, starts to investigate, the two find traces of a very sinister conspiracy...

This film is the best of messes. Every time you think it flies of the rails, a plot point will be revealed which sobers everyone up just enough to get back to the central storyline. Think of Hot Fuzz but instead of a supercop you get someone who constantly fucks up everything, to the exasperation of friend and foe alike. And yet, Fulda's mental ailments aren't being made fun of, he's no "Inspecteur Clousau". That both he and his therapist manage to get to the film's finale because of their flaws, instead of by overcoming them, is a major plot point. This is a grey film with black humor. It is also, in places, very, VERY funny.

Like in Franck Dubosc's How to Make a Killing (seen at last year's Film by the Sea), director Sarah Arnold treats rural corruption as something inevitable. The original French title is L' Espèce Explosive, meaning The Explosive Species, with explosive pointing at both the population growth of the boars and the tensions arising from that. But I can't shake the feeling that Sarah Arnold also uses the title to refer to humans as easily prone to outbursts, and that she hails to that. Her film seems to say that most systems can do with the occasional crazy outburst or two. I loved it, and the Vlissingen audiences awarded the film a 3.8 out of 5.