Too Many Beasts

 “Man is the only animal that causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.”
 — Mark Twain 

Too Many Beasts pretends to be an investigation, but in truth it is a general collapse of meaning. An apparently concrete rural world quickly dissolves into an unstable geometry where rich and poor, men and women, humans and animals are no longer categories but provisional forms of mutual aggression. The French countryside thus becomes a jammed moral machine, producing flesh, guilt, and disaster with the same indifference. 

Within this landscape, philosophy is reduced to what remains once explanations stop functioning. And what remains is a grotesque field of forces: capital disguised as tradition, masculinity cracking beneath its own weight, the psyche unable to withstand the pressure of reality. 

Fulda, portrayed with extraordinary precision by Alexis Manenti, becomes its unstable epicenter. He wants to be treated by a male psychoanalyst, as if healing were a matter of anatomical resemblance, a solidarity among masculine failures. The psychoanalyst disarms him with a line that already feels like a diagnosis of the contemporary world: “I’m incompetent enough to be a man.” It is not a joke but a political declaration: patriarchy is not authority, but a poor imitation of one. 

When Fulda insists — because, ultimately, he prefers a man “since a woman tells you she loves you and then leaves you” — therapy mutates into a scene both comic and cruel. Desire is no longer romanticism but an archive of wounds: the psychoanalyst, exasperated, seems less eager to leave the room than to abandon the human species altogether. In a moment of terminal lucidity, she implicitly confesses that she would rather spend her time spinning wool than continue dealing with human beings. And who could blame her. Around them, psychoanalytic language no longer serves to understand, but to multiply misunderstandings. Every sentence opens a void. Every interpretation becomes a deviation. The film seems to suggest that the unconscious is not a depth, but a mismanagement of the surface. 

In this sense, Too Many Beasts openly converses with that cinema of philosophical absurdity which, from Albert Camus onward, has attempted to transform the incomprehensibility of the world into narrative form. More recently, it recalls the cinema of Quentin Dupieux: not because of a simple taste for nonsense, but because of the ironic lucidity through which absurdity becomes the only possible realism. Yet here comedy always hovers on the edge of ethical collapse: one laughs, but in the way one laughs before something that can no longer even be named. 

The film’s deeper structure unfolds as an extended metaphor: the world as a relationship between predators and prey. The rich hunt for sport what the poor are forced to endure; animals invade what humans are no longer capable of governing; and in between, emotional relationships reproduce the very same structure, only with less forest and more illusion. 

The wild boar, then, is not a symbol but a systemic error: what happens when nature stops respecting social categories. It is both threat and truth, as though reality itself had decided to appear without mediation. 

In the end, Too Many Beasts does not tell a story about hunting, but a theory of failure — and it does so with remarkable irony: the failure of control, of language, of love, of politics. Above all, the failure of the idea that the human is something stable. 

What remains is a lucidly unpleasant sensation: that civilization is nothing more than a temporary agreement between different species of beasts — some walking on four legs, others convinced they possess two extra ones by moral right. 

“Man has invented war because he is incapable of solving the problem of his own existence.”
 — Carl Gustav Jung