Them (2006)

In a style not dissimilar to "Halloween" a young French couple living in Romania are terrorized by a group of unknown assailants in the country home. Their reason is reasonless. It is simply a case of senseless violence inflicted on two complete innocents.

The film's credits open with a line stating that the story was based on real events and then we are immediately thrust into the death of a mother and daughter on a deserted stretch of road. It is simply blatant foreshadowing for what is going to come. As I watched the film I reminded myself that what happened was basically true, but it wasn't until the very end that I became conscious of the true gravity of the situation.

Clementine and Lucas emigrated to Romania three months prior to their one fateful evening. He is a writer and she is a French teacher of schoolchildren. Their lives don't seem to be particularly interesting, nor do they seem to be particularly interesting people. On a random night, however, their house is invaded by faceless shadows, invisible in the darkness. With minimal gore and almost unending tension the two must fight for their survival which ends at dawn.

There is little else to say as far as plot is concerned as that is pretty much the extent of the story. The movie completely abandons all conventions of narrative and character development, simply giving us a solid hour of a cat and mouse chase. No back story and almost no resolution is given. The end attempts to be haunting which it almost succeeds at, but instead it left me disappointed. Certainly, what we do learn about the attackers is extremely shocking, especially because it is true, but I couldn't help feeling cheated out of a far more impressive story for this simple scary movie.

If I were the family members of the two victims I certainly would never have consented to allow the story to be dramatized and certainly not in the genre that it was. Clem and Lucas are formless beings given a cliched evening of romance that adds nothing to who they are. After twenty minutes of this we are left with a merciless sequence of jumpy moments and an ending which does nothing to distinguish them.

The film's tactlessness aside, what it did offer was done well. The figures are not frightening once they are seen, but we are left blind to them for most of the movie. It is shot in a big, creepy house in a country which I already associate with bad happenings, and the film relies not so much on what is seen, but what is heard. Industrial noises and animal cries build a sense of dread that is relentless throughout. If anyone is to be praised here, it is the sound editor.

I wanted to like this movie and in some ways I did, but one cannot simply abandon structure, narrative, characters and etiquette and expect to get away with it. With a proper script directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud could do good things, but I still want to give them a slap on the wrist.

1.5/4