It's important to arrive with no expectations or information prior to viewing Them because the entire film's carefully orchestrated suspense and tension is dependent on the mysterious nature and origins of the malevolent title characters. The less said about the plot the better but here is a thumbnail set-up for you. A young couple from France live in a huge, rambling mansion in a bucolic rural setting, not far from Bucharest. Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) works as a schoolteacher in the city and Lucas (Michael Cohen) is a professional writer and from all appearances their relationship is still in the romantic honeymoon phase. After a pleasant evening together they retire to bed but Olivia is later awakened by strange noises outside the house. At first nothing seems to be amiss but then Clementine and Lucas think they see some movement in the courtyard below and notice that Clementine's car has been moved from its original location. Thus begins a horrific home invasion that is just as relentless and brutal as the one currently being played out in Michael Haneke's current remake of his 1997 thriller, Funny Games. But the difference is we don't know who or what is attacking Clementine and Lucas for the first two thirds of the movie. Even in the movie's final third, where we get a better look at Clementine and Lucas's tormentors, we're not quite sure what to make of them. Are they aliens masquerading as humans? Are they escaped mental patients? Are they supernatural manifestations? Are they figments of the couple's imagination?
Written and directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, Them is, indeed, a nerve jangling thrill ride, and the fact that the movie is in French with English subtitles shouldn't dissuade anyone from seeing it because once the terror begins the dialogue is mimimal except for screaming, cursing and cries of pain. Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen are perfectly believable as the attractive young couple under siege and give intensely physical performances in the film's second half you'll be exhausted just watching them run through the woods or race around their huge home, attempt to scale fences and walls, and crawl on their hands and knees through underground tunnels and worse.
In addition to the tight pacing and the actors' believable confusion and panic at their unprovoked harassment, Rene-Marc Bini's music score and the disturbing sound effects help rev up the tension another notch and at times can make you jump out of your seat, particularly the famous keyhole scene where Clementine tries to see what's in the hallway outside the door or the opening sequence of a quarrelsome mother and her blasé teenage daughter having a freak auto accident on a deserted rural road. Them is refreshingly atypical of the current "torture-porn" trend in horror and frightens its audience through psychological means instead of explicit gore or depraved acts of sadism. It also helps that it gets the job done in seventy seven minutes with no lulls in the narrative to slow the momentum.
Although Them is reportedly based on a true story, it's quite unlikely that the real events unfolded in quite the same manner since so much of what we see in Them approaches an almost supernatural level of intensity. It's also too bad that David Moreau and Xavier Palud followed up this impressive rollercoaster ride with The Eye, the dismal Hollywood remake of the Hong Kong thriller Jian Gui.
The DVD of Them presents the film in its original 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio with audio options of Dolby 2.0 stereo and Dolby 5.1 surround. The visual quality of the movie is impressive for a movie shot on DV-CAM as it often has a genuine "film look" with rich blacks and good detail in the shadows and nighttime scenes. The extra features include the self-descriptive "The Making of Them," plus a featurette on composer Rene-Marc Bini and one on a harrowing sequence in the film involving actress Olivia Bonamy entitled "The Torture of Clementine."
For more information about Them, visit Dark Sky Films. To order Them, go to TCM Shopping.
by Jeff Stafford
