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Them [Ils]
Not the one with the giant ants
2006
Review: August 28, 2007
Director: David Moreau, Xavier Palud
Starring: Olivia Bonamy, Michael Cohen
YES!
THE SETUP:
Couple are terrorized in their Romanian house.
DISCUSSION:
This got a good review from the NYTimes, and I was kind of curious, then a bad review somewhere else, which said it just pointlessly jerked you around, which made me lose interest. But me and my friend wanted to see something, and there wasn’t much else.
We open in Romania in 2002 with this mother and her daughter driving home in a minivan. The daughter is a horrible snotty bitch, and I was just starting to hate them both when they have an accident and have to go check under the hood [or at least the mother does, the horrid daughter doesn’t move]. Anyway, it’s scary, and things don’t end well for either of them.
We then join this woman Clementine, a woman teaching French in a school in Romania. As she drives home, she passes the van we saw earlier, right down the road from where she lives. She and her husband [or boyfriend, who knows] live in this huge house that is fabulous, but way too huge for both of them, and quite a fixer-upper. They have dinner and flirt and have sex and in the middle of the night, Clementine gets a call with nothing but strange amphibious noises on the other end.
So in the middle of the night Clem wakes to hear some rock music outside, as if some kids are having a party. She wakes her husband up, and they go downstairs to find that their car has been moved. Before you know it, there are strangers with flashlights roving around the house, and Clem and Lucas are scrambling around trying to both figure out what’s going on and find a safe place to hide. This part is the scariest, and I literally has my eyes just below the screen for most of it. In here you’ve noticed that we haven’t been able to discern a single thing about the invaders, like how many of them are there, who or what are they, what do they want?
So for the first fifteen minutes of the home invasion, I was on the edge of my seat, a nervous wreck, jumping at everything that appeared on screen, and keeping my eyes mostly just below the screen's edge. It was terrifying!
But then the movie lost me. I think in part it was a victim of its own success, because when a movie is really scaring you, it's simultaneously building you up for a release of energy, which can often come in the form of a complete rejection of what the movie's about, and that's what happened here. For me, it was that Clem and Lucas just weren't fighting back—in fact, I believe the exact moment I turned against the movie was when Clem throws one assailant off the roof, and sees another beginning to climb up to her. But rather than look around for something to drop on him or hit him with once he reaches the top, she just runs around frantically. Then she keeps running around, not picking anything up to use as a weapon, not developing a strategy, not fighting back at all, just running around mindlessly. Her husband's the same way. It began to remind me of that visual joke at the beginning of the first Scary Movie, where Carmen Electra is chased by a psycho and stops by a tray containing a gun, a knife, a club, a banana, and a razor—and chooses the banana. By this time all my fear had gone, I could watch the screen without any tension, and just kind of waited to see how it all worked out.
One thing the movie does pretty well—but which probably contributes to the ease with which one finally just gives up on it—is not tell you anything about the couple's assailants. We know that they're humanoid and they make strange noises [and they can drive a car], but other than that all sorts of theories run through one's mind—are they escaped convicts? Aliens? Mutants? The family who used to live in the house? You don't find out until near the end, and you don't find out the whole story until the very end.
All that said, if you have any interest in this movie, you deserve not to have the ending spoiled for you. The explanation kind of renews interest in the movie to a small extent, but not enough the feeling of being jerked around a little bit. For me at least. And the friend I went with didn't like it all that much, either. But it wasn't a total waste of time—and it has the sense to last only 76 minutes. Although one leaves feeling it couldn't possibly sustain one second more.
Oh, by the way, the website for this movie advises those with heart conditions that they should NOT view the website. You see, it's just THAT terrifying. I'd love to see statistics of people who died by viewing scary websites. There's an example of how a movie's marketing can make you hate a movie. Fucking assholes. One Olivia off, just for that.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you're a huge horror fan and have to see everything. Others can pretty safely steer clear.
