Great white-knuckle nail-biter. Unlike the recent crop of horror films, Ils eschews the gore and simply ratchets up anxiety — with excellent steady editing, a shrewd use of shots and lighting, freaky sound. It opens cold, with a mother and irritating teen daughter crashing their car and finding themselves confronted by hidden antagonists. Then, switch gears to the real protagonists, we watch a French teacher and her husband in their country home find themselves subject to the same unexplained, merciless taunting and attack.
I gotta say, I loved it. At about 75 minutes, it’s deliberately paced but sleek and shorn of fat. Freaked me out something wonderful…
And I think the two directors are people to watch. Opening credits roll over a montage of the teacher’s car driving home. All of the shots are from above, composed with precision to follow the red vehicle along a straight line of highway, diagonally ‘up’ the shot through a neighborhood, around a curve. It’s a beautiful scene, disconnected from the story, but the imagery–this small motion, along precise geometrical lines–is both beautiful and a sly nod to the narrative structure, the cold hard precision of this kind of horror film.
I miss invisible porn.
Where is everyone? My excuse is I’ve been watching West Wing.
we just finished watching the last season. don’t you think that it’s standing the test of time pretty magnificently? even watching it after the wire doesn’t make me cringe, as i feared it might. well done aaron sorkin.
Yeah, it did hold up. Mauer commented a long time ago about how good Alda was, and so was Alison Janney–between those two, I could put up with the occasional aggravating subplot. (E.g., Donna and Josh sent me into insulin shock.)
We’re now watching Battlestar‘s third season.
Really? REALLY? Great, white-knuckle nail biter? I found this sorta boring. The settings make no sense (endless labyrinth after labyrinth: hallways, plastic sheets, concrete tunnels), and I was missing a sense of dread and/or mystery (the isolated country house trope felt more ironic than suspensful). The climatic “reveal” was a joke right? Was this film supposed to be funny? A funny game? The characters were one-dimensional and uninteresting. An obvious nod to Haneke (the overhead tracking shot of a car moving through Bucharest) lacked portent. Shouldn’t a horror film show me something I don’t want to see (or maybe something I shouldn’t see)? The Village Voice compared it to a live-action video game which reminds me why I don’t play video games. I guess I understand why you liked it. Formally, it does generate tension and it is certainly restrained which seems novel these days; I just never felt tense or anxious. I thought the Hitchcockian opening sequence to be overlit and overacted. Sigh. I wanted to be scared.
I still miss invisible porn.
I went and read that Voice review, and I think it’s much in keeping with my comments–it’s an exercise in pure form, with only the most tenuous connection to character, to motive or purpose or plot, to meaning. I like that; it is like a distillation of a slasher film, which foregoes most of the slashing to instead concentrate on the formal energy of the hunt. I would compare it to video games ‘cept I’ve never liked them; my comparison would be to a great amusement park ride.
I feel bad that you wanted to be scared but weren’t, so I’ll try to scare you. One of these evenings you’ll awaken, and I’ll be standing over your bed, watching you sleep. I won’t nudge or make noise. I’ll just stand there, staring at your prone form. Watching.
Jeff’s production of “Aunt Dan and Lemon” was pretty damn good. It’s a hard, tonally-knotted play, and yet the actors carried the load with confidence and style. Pretty impressive work, J.
i found ils/them pretty freaky as well, all the way up to the reveal, at which point the menace leaked away completely (though i suspect it was meant to chill further). seemed like a genre workout to me, but here’s an interesting reading of it as an allegory of french unease at the expansion of the eu (lots of spoilers in the review).
Hey Mike, I somehow missed your generous nod to Aunt Dan all those months ago. Thanks!
I just watched Eden Lake, another in the global spate of kids-killing-adults films that I found entirely aggravating. As titles roll on this one, a chat show talks about Tony Blair’s drive to restore respect, about a bill (real? beats me) to fine parents who don’t discipline their kids, etc. Soon after, gorgeous yuppie couple run into lowlife lower-class adults behaving poorly, then in a bucolic quarry run into a posse of little asswipes who move quickly from spitting and being rude to stealing cars and smackdowns and then your bit of ultravee.
I kind of dig the uncanny vibe in many kids-killing movies, but to go and spell out the background, to make some quasi-social-realist hay out of an absurdist phobia just pissed me off. And while Eden has a competent cast and director, its vision seems grounded in that (foolish) desire to ground the horror. I found myself, instead of tsk-tsking over kids and bad parenting, drawing comparisons across the films and seeing a few key elements: it’s always poor–or poor-signified–kids, always a middle-to-upper-class couple, usually it’s a disruption of a romantic relationship in that couple. I’m curious what hay we might make of this genre mini-explosion at the cusp of and now into a global financial crisis.
Or fuck the cultural critique: I *liked* a couple of these, particularly Ils and El Rey de la Montana. They surprised me, even within the narrows of this genre’s razor-thin plot structure. Eden suffers aesthetically from its attempt to have its generic exploitative anxiety and legitimize its violence, too.
I meant to say a couple weeks back that I really enjoyed ‘El Rey de la Montana’. The tension builds, appears to dissipate and then builds again, perfectly mirroring the emotions of the two leads. And it was nice to see the film not trying to fill in the back story. We get hints of past relationships, never explained, and the killers remain enigmas. What is the role of the father? Is the mother aware of what is going on? Simple but excellent.