Many of us dream of making that “escape to the country,” finding a pastoral piece of rural wherever to get away from it all, get back to the land and experience a little peace.

But what did Sartre warn us? “Hell is other people.” No, he wasn’t talking about Jason Aldean’s idea of “small towns.” But he could’ve been. No matter where you are in the world, that “get away from it all” move is wholly dependent on how friendly or unfriendly the locals are where you move.

Set aside your Hollywood preconceptions about psychological thrillers when you take in “The Beasts” (“As Bestas”), a Spanish tale with a hint of “Straw Dogs” about it, although “Jean de Florette” was an obvious inspiration, above and beyond a true story told in a 2016 documentary.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen serves up a tense, suspenseful tale of French “outsiders” facing rising intimidation, taunts and worse from hostile locals when they move to a remote mountain village in the north of Spain.

The long opening scene, in the bar in this tiny “ghost town,” introduces bullying blowhard Xan (Luis Zahera), and it quickly becomes obvious why he’s always dominating the conversation over drinks dominoes. If he lets anybody else get in a word edgewise, his intellectual limitations will stand out all the more.

He lords over his simpler brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) and buries one and all in BS and abuse.

But the guy he really hates is the burly farmer he nicknames “Frenchy.” Antonoine (Denis Ménochet) is a bear of a man who avoids confrontation with this big mouth as he sips his drink. But he can’t even leave in peace. The Francophobic Xan finishes off his dimwitted insults about the French and Spanish history with an “In this country, we say hello” and “goodbye” when entering or leaving a bar (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Antoine gives the impression he could pound this Okie-lean 50something lout into the tiled floor. But he was a school teacher. He’s just mastered the language. He and his wife run an organic farm and sell their wares at the farmer’s market and at street fairs. They need to get along.

So Antoine takes it.

There’s bad blood, we learn. Wife Olga (Marina Foïs) isn’t all that committed to this place where “We break our backs and empty our savings.” And those Anta brothers aren’t going to leave them in peace and aren’t going to ever accept them, no matter how many abandoned, ruined old houses they restore to livable in a dirt road village where no one else would ever move.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience. Antoine can’t get the local cops interested in the various violations the Antas visit upon. So he starts secretly recording them.

The brutish brothers may not be sophisticated, but they know how to mess with a fellow farmer.

And on and on it goes.

When Claude Berri told this sort of story, he made it a two-film saga of ancient grudges coming home to roost — “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” two of the great French films of the ’80s.

Sorogoyen boils this saga down to a single story, with subtle twists and steadily rising suspense. You think you’re guessing where it’s going, but you don’t. This may have hints of “Straw Dogs,” but the real world isn’t a Sam Peckinpah movie. This may lean on Berri’s films, but it diverges from those in fascinating ways.

Zahera loses himself in Xan, a fuming jerk who is just smart enough to know that his fury is all he can count on when he’s looking for someone else to blame for his life.

Ménochet gives Antoine a delusional trust in his instincts, in common sense, reason and his ability to read people and especially his trust in Spain’s version of “useless rural cops'” concept of right and wrong.

Foïs keeps Olga’s deepest thoughts secret even if her deepest fears are something she isn’t shy about expressing to her husband.

The scenery, the seasons, even the worn and emptied-out mountain village have a hypnotic beauty in “The Beasts.” But Sorogoyen’s film reminds us that scenery and the nature walks it invites aren’t everything, and that “escape” is illusory. Out in the country, you’re on your own, and you’re at the mercy of other people and other people’s values and limits of how far they’ll go in a feud.

If you don’t know that grudge isn’t going away, and that neither are they, you’re smart as you think.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marina Foïs, Denis Ménochet, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido and Marie Colomb.

Credits:Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, scripted by Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen . A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:17