Built to Thrill

Them does its one thing well.

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

Sometimes you just have to admire something for choosing to do one simple thing and doing it efficiently. In shooting to keep audiences jumping out of their seats, this Romanian-shot, French-birthed thriller is as single-minded as compilation porn.

Hardly in need of recap, Them simply involves a young couple in a large house being terrorized by unseen aggressors over the course of a long, dark night. Pursuit into the woods and subsequently into a sewer merely introduce variations on a theme. This is a movie about two people having the bejesus scared out of them and hopefully transmitting some of that terror off the screen.

There is one bid for social relevance — in the final-twist reveal of the perpetrators — but it's an afterthought and comes with an are-you-buying-this "based on a true story" crawl that's about as trustworthy as similar claims in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Fargo. (The actual events, such as they were, apparently happened to Austrians in the Czech Republic.)

The titular pronoun is obviously intended for the largely unseen attackers, but could just as well refer to the paper-thin leads — who are little more than a place for the screams to come from and for the shadows to point toward. (It decidedly does not — regrettably given the absurd left turn it could have provided — refer to giant ants.) Basic biographical information is sketched in — she's a French teacher in Bucharest, he's a homebound novelist — merely to provide a reason for them to be in that place at that time. From there on out, the couple are simply a pair of bodies running in front of the camera as they're pursued by half-glimpsed figures, flashlight beams and the sounds of running feet.

Co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud do an admirable job of milking the limited scenario for all it's worth. A nerve-wrecking introductory murder sequence gets the crowd on the edge of their seats, slows down briefly for the setup, then keeps them there throughout the remaining tense 75 minutes with old-school horror tricks. There's barely a drop of blood, let alone the de rigeur Saw-inspired gore setpieces. In fact, there's barely any color at all, the dimly lit pursuit daubed in shades of gray that render the whole thing in a gritty chiaroscuro.

Moreau and Palud have already been plucked up by Hollywood, slated to helm the Jessica Alba-starring remake of the Pang brothers' Hong Kong transplant horror film The Eye. Streamlined and efficient are hardly descriptors that come in very handy in modern Hollywood horror, so it's difficult to say whether the duo will be able to translate their effectiveness into English. But relentless shrieking works in any language.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Them (Ils)

Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud | A Dark Sky Films