Safe as houses

French-made but shot on location in Romania, David Moreau and Xavier Palud's jointly directed THEM (ILS, 2006) brings to mind a number of English (or filmed in England) thrillers from the heyday of menace - chiefly AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970) and SEE NO EVIL (aka BLIND TERROR, 1971) - squeezing as it does a minimum of locations and a brevity of dialogue for maximum audience unease and an galloping sense of dread. The screenplay, purportedly based on actual events, has a Brian Clemens tartness, smartly going monosyllabic where too many like-minded scripts get all gassy and prolix. It gets people.

Although the phrase "home invasion" is a fairly recent addition to the global crime parlance, a number of fatal break-ins have become the stuff of legend - in the Grimm sense of the word - for the way their heinous particulars have burned themselves into the common consciousness. THEM recalls both the 1959 slaying of the entire Clutter Family of Holcomb, Kansas (recounted in Truman Capote's 1966 best seller In Cold Blood and Richard Brooks' 1967 film version) and the slaughter of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and several house guests by members of the Manson family ( an event dramatized a number of times but never so indelibly as in the 1977 made-for-TV movie HELTER SKELTER). There's also a beguiling strain of urban myth at work in THEM, which offers up a murderous curtain warmer channeling the classic urban legend "The Hook" as a bickering mother and daughter find themselves at the mercy of more than the elements when they crash their car on a stretch of country road.

Because of its classification as a siege scenario, THEM cant' help but draw comparisons to David Fincher's PANIC ROOM (2002) and Mike Figgis' COLD CREEK MANOR (2003). However these films may resemble one another in the broad strokes, THEM is far more successful in both particularizing the quiet lives of its protagonists (a teacher of French as a second language and her writer paramour) and the at first subtle (and then dramatic) ways the sanctity of their provincial fixer-upper is violated. By and large, Moreau and Palud avoid the big Hollywood setpiece scenes that made the Fincher and Figgis films so unbearably pat and even risible (COLD CREEK MANOR's snake invasion deserves a mention here), preferring small, neatly observed moments that isolate Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen), first as homeowners protecting their turf and then as individuals scrambling for their very lives.

In America, the use of the English language title THEM forces an unfortunate and distracting association with the giant ant jamoboree THEM! (1954), while horror fans might also flash on Robert (THE HITCHER) Harmon's minor boogeyman opus THEY (2002)... in short, prompting audiences to expect bona fide monsters rather than flesh and blood predators. I confess I did feel a fleeting sense of disappointment when one of the interlopers is revealed, albeit briefly, and looking in his hoodie not unlike Eminem in 8 MILE (2002) but to its credit, THEM drew me back in, delivering a (to me) surprising coda and an epilogue text crawl that not only justifies the title but delivers a whopping perspective switch-around, revealing that "them" refers not to the malefactors but rather the objects of their murderous caprice.

That grim endnote caps a layer of class consciousness that simmers throughout THEM from its earliest frames but never quite becomes a going "us versus them" concern in the fashion of Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977). One needs to know something about the recent history of Romania to fully appreciate the climactic reveal, which puts the film squarely in the company of a particular horror subgenre that I can't name for fear of spoiling anything for viewers coming to this cold. I agree with critic Matt Zoller Seitz who, in his The New York Times review last August, stated "the movie is scarier if you know nothing about it going in." I disagree with Matt, though, when he says "It has no larger agenda. It’s not an allegory, a satire or a commentary. It’s just a modestly relentless suspense picture..." While I don't think THEM is primarily allegorical, I do believe it has a higher purpose and its own ideas about human connection, illustrated at its most dead ended early in the film as Clémentine, on her cell with Lucas and making weekend plans, blithely drives by a tow truck hoisting the ruin of the car we see wrecked in the first scene.

THEM understands that real horror isn't exotic or Gothic but commonplace and ultimately even a little banal. (Cold comfort there.) The moral of this story is that we run the risk of losing that which is most precious to us through nothing so much as inattention. While we're busy making other plans, we don't see that horror lives in our home town, it shares our space, it's in the car right behind us and it knows where we live.