‘Too Many Beasts’ Review: A Small-Town Policeman Gets High on the Hog in a Deliciously Droll French Crime-Caper

The quiet French provincial thriller *Too Many Beasts* arrives at a curious cultural moment, where the line between crime fiction and outright farce feels increasingly porous. The film’s premise—a small-town policeman stumbling into a surreal, drug-fueled conspiracy—might seem like another oddball entry in France’s long tradition of darkly comic rural mysteries, but its timing suggests something more layered. For decades, French cinema has mined the absurdity of its own bureaucracy and policing with films like Bertrand Blier’s *Les Valseuses* or Jacques Rivette’s *Céline and Julie Go Boating*, where incompetence and menace collide. Yet *Too Many Beasts* feels less like a throwback than a distillation of modern anxieties: the erosion of institutional trust, the creeping influence of unregulated substances in isolated communities, and the way ordinary people become unwitting players in larger, absurd dramas. What makes this film’s setting particularly potent is its contrast with France’s self-image as a land of refined taste and order. The provincial backwater—with its closed-off social hierarchies and lingering feudal attitudes—has long been a microcosm for exploring national identity. Dumont’s earlier works, like *The Life of Jesus*, used the same terrain to depict alienation and violence beneath pastoral surfaces. Here, the humor isn’t just a stylistic choice but a necessary release valve, allowing audiences to laugh at the very institutions that often fail them. Yet the film’s most unsettling question lingers: is the absurdity a comedy of errors, or a sign of deeper systemic rot? Looking ahead, *Too Many Beasts* might signal a wave of similarly tonally ambivalent crime capers, where the mystery is less about whodunit than why anyone bothers. If so, it reflects a broader trend in European cinema toward narratives that reject neat resolutions in favor of messy, human-scale chaos. The open question is whether audiences will embrace this as clever satire or dismiss it as mere whimsy—especially as real-world policing faces scrutiny over accountability and competence. Either way, the film’s real achievement may be in proving that even in the most absurd scenarios, the stakes always feel dangerously real.