Dir.
David Moreau & Xavier Palud, France, 2007, 78 mins
Cast: Olivia Bonamy, Michael Cohen
Review by Will Davis
In the long tradition
of horror pics it’s
standard to expect plenty of screams, jumps and usually a
healthy dollop of gore for good measure, so when a film comes
along with a premise, not to mention a title, like Them!,
you’d expect to sit back and start spraying the popcorn.
And just to clarify by the way, this isn’t a remake
of the 1950s horror in which an army of mutant ants try to
take over America.
After a successfully scary opening
sequence in which a mother and daughter drive off the road
and are menaced by someone – or
something – unseen from the forest, Them! begins with
your average drop dead gorgeous teacher Clementine (Bonamy)
driving home from school. Naturally enough she lives in a
big house in the woods, with her suitably attractive novelist
partner Lucus (Cohen). That evening they go to bed and are
awoken in the night by sounds downstairs…and from
this point onwards they are fighting for their lives against
the titular them, who seem ubiquitous yet as evasive as shadows.
If popcorn munching is your thing, you can certainly expect
to be annoying the ushers watching this. However this would
be to do down the qualities of Them! which is a well made
and well-acted film of surprising class.
When a director says. “The aim was neither to show
nor to describe but to make people experience”, as
Moreau does in the programme notes, it is usually code for
Low Budget. Yet Them! is not a film that wants or requires
costly special effects – it is genuinely scary and
jumpy without them. Tension mounts at quite a rapid pace,
and once the scares kick in, it never really slackens – which
does make for a rather exhausting viewing experience. But
what impresses about Them! is the atmosphere that pervades
the initial third of the film, which is created purely out
of nothing. The audience doesn't even get a glimpse of the
stalkers: rather we simply watch Clementine returning to
the remote house where she lives, meeting Lucas, sharing
a meal and watching TV with him. In this time the house itself
becomes a shadowy corner-filled catastrophe waiting-to-happen;
the viewer is constantly made aware of what lies behind the
actors, and as a result is constantly expecting to see something
out of the ordinary appear there. Except that we never do,
and the more we don’t, the more we edgily expect it.
There is of course a substantial back
catalogue of horror pics that have had to work around fiscal
constraints, from Halloween to Jaws, where the tension
is layered using deft camerawork, well -timed piano cords
and lots of screaming. Them! has more than its fair share
of these. Most of Clementine’s
lines in the script must have read “Arghhh!”.
Nonetheless, this a film that definitely earns its shocks,
plunging the viewer into what is essentially a very simple,
stripped down scenario and somehow managing to make it seem
original. Whether this is due to the merciless invasion of
sacred personal space, or simply the idea of being stalked
relentlessly by unseen hooded types, is for private judgement.
But what stops Them! from being just
another scream-fest is the ending. Keeping the couple’s antagonists unseen
for most of the film works fine, but when they are eventually
revealed it is by no means an anticlimax. Indeed, it is at
this point that the real chill sets in, suggesting that underneath
the shock treatment lies a film more in keeping with the
close-to-the-bone nastiness and pique of Haneke’s Funny
Games than the standard fright machinations of the horror
genre. The final blurb after the end sequence suggests that
without one realising it, this film has slowly transformed
into something resembling a social comment on the differences
between adults and children.
Overall Them! is a very unnerving film and should prove
something of a treat for both dedicated horror fans as well
as those who like a little more from their splatter movies
than, well, splatter. And this will definitely have you locking
the doors at home afterwards; especially if you live in the
countryside near a high quotient of disaffected teens.
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