Them (aka Ils)

I often invite my friends over to watch screeners with me. I hadn’t heard of this one at the time (this was before its theatrical release) but we were all blown away by it. Them has to rank among the best of films I’ve seen that bank on threat of the unknown and have something to say to boot. The premise is threadbare involving a young couple who are attacked in a vacation home for no reason by a group of unknown hooded assailants. But what makes the premise work is, among other things, the delicate balance the film maintains between our awareness that the threat is human and our suspicion that it might be more than that. When the hoods finally do come off we are still left uncertain. Can this threat simply be described as human? Our questions about the nature of evil are deep at the heart of this movie and best of all they might just resonant with the core audience of casual thinkers who swallow whatever clichéd schlock gets hyped in the horror field.

And for sheer filmmaking craft you certainly don’t have to look any further. I don’t fault the recent Inside or other highly suspenseful efforts like High Tension for their gore. On the contrary those films clearly have disgust and biology at their center. But while the filmmakers here could have fallen back on the sorts of cheap scares and gore thrills that often pervade lesser works that offer up simple plots supposedely at the service of high minded provovacteurs and their dialogues about movie violence etc. (see Eli Roth) they instead choose the much more difficult road of actually scaring the crap out of you and barely hinting there’s any point to it at all until the end. The only hint is the absence of more intense onscreen violence. 

Dark Sky getting into the theatrical business appears to have started off well. There are some extras here but not enough. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a serious special edition of this made available by somebody down the road. Three featurettes include a making of, a look at the composer and examination of a particular scene.