Annual Top Films Lists

Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2019: #98. Seules les bêtes (Only Beasts) – Dominik Moll

Published on January 3, 2019

Only Beasts (Seules les bêtes)

Director Dominik Moll returns to genre for his sixth film Seules les bêtes (Only Beasts), adapted from a 2017 novel by Colin Niel. The French-German co-production is financed through Razor Film (Germany) and Haut Et Court (France) and features a high-profile cast consisting of Denis Menochet, Damien Bonnard, Laure Calamy and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. Moll scored his greatest successes in the early 2000s, competing in Cannes and winning a Cesar for Best Director with his 2002 sophomore film With a Friend Like Harry (which at one point was going to be remade by Kimberly Peirce). Moll returned to the Cannes competition with his underrated psychological thriller Lemming (2005), which opened the festival and starred Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg. In 2011, Moll adapted the classic gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Lewis and turned to comedy with 2016’s News from the Planet Mars, which premiered in Berlin out-of-competition.

Gist: Adapted from Colin Niel’s book of the same name, this is about a woman is presumed missing or potentially dead when her car is discovered on the side of a mountain road after a snowstorm. The police have no leads but five people each harbor a secret connecting them to the woman’s disappearance.

Release Date/Prediction: Moll is set to go into production in early 2019. A return to Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight might be possible or potentially Locarno (Moll wrote the screenplay for Gilles Marchand’s 2016 genre piece In the Forest, which also played in Locarno).

Nicholas Bell

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.