Ils (2006)

also known as Them, but honestly, that title belongs to my favorite giant bug movie.

Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen) are a French married couple living and working in Rumania. Clementine teaches French in a school in Bucharest, while Lucas stays at home, living the sexy lifestyle of the blocked writer. Their home is a gigantic mansion that has seen better days and - looking at the few pieces of furniture in it, as well as the fact that this is not a rich couple - obviously went for cheap. It's not a big surprise, really. Whoever would want to live this remote in the woods?

The couple takes an environment that would keep me in a permanent state of panic with the shrug that suggests people who never have been in any physical danger. Of course, they both don't know of the murder of a woman and her daughter that took place not far from their home the night before that functioned as the film's pre-title teaser as if this was a rather tame episode of The X-Files.

For characters in a horror film, Clementine and Lucas have quite well developed survival instincts, though. So, when Clementine is woken by strange noises from outside the house (or are they inside?) at night, she first wakes up her husband and then goes to look at the source of the noises together with him.

Someone has gotten into Clementine's car and drives away with it, but only after toying a little with Lucas in a style that most definitely does not look like a thing a normal car thief would do and suggests that something more sinister is afoot.

Clementine calls the police, but is, in the least believable moment of the film, put off until the next morning.

A few moments later, the electricity of the house is cut and the couple has to deal with the fact that someone (or is it something?) much worse than a burglar has come for a visit.

Ils is yet another part of the small horror renaissance which has taken place in France in the last few years. Where most other films of the type are quite gory, Ils mostly tries its hand at classic suspense techniques. With the gore, the film unfortunately also seems to have lost an direct interest in politics or philosophy (which, even when both interests aren't going all that deep, are the core difference between these films and your typical American horror movie of the last two decades for me). One can of course still find subtext here - it's just that it doesn't look as if the film's directors were consciously trying to make a point or were reflecting on what their film could be saying.

Instead, we get a very straightforward thriller, well played, stylish-but-not-annoyingly-so directed, with creepy locations which do in fact look like real physical spaces and with some elements of the trope of "terrible things going on just under the surface of modern, normal life" that is especially beloved in my house.

I found the final fifteen minutes especially striking regarding the latter, although I couldn't shake the feeling that the directors wanted the viewer to have a much stronger emotional reaction to the identity of the killers than I had. Who Can Kill A Child for example handled a similar set-up a lot more harrowing. Of course, that film was also quite a bit more ambitious and its director wasn't on his way to make bland Hollywood remakes of solid Asian horror movies as Ils' Moreau and Palud would with their pointless The Eye remake.

All this isn't to say that Ils isn't worth watching. As a well-paced horror thriller it works nicely, it just lacks the little bit more of substance that makes the difference between a very competent and a very good film.

 

Technorati-Tags: french movies,horror,reviews