Ils (2006)

Back in the summer of 2008 (great summer, by the way), my sister and I went to the movies with our boyfriends to see The Strangers. The cinema environment naturally enhances the fear factor of decent horror movies (provided you don't have any sarcastic assholes in the house), and the movie scared the shit out of us. It prompted a lifelong fear of uncurtained windows after dark. And being alone in a house at night. But fuck it, every horror movie had done that.


It was claimed that The Strangers was based on Ils, which I am somewhat ashamed to have taken ten years to watch. The copy that I picked up had an English cover and was titled Them, but my DVD turned out to be an original without subtitles. Fortunately, I am a moderate French speaker and am in the habit of watching French movies to improve my language skills, so it posed me a nice challenge. Particularly as the movie actually takes place in Bucharest and features some Romanian dialogue too. If anybody out there is a particularly cunning linguist like myself (*wink*), Romanian is an interesting language, which a native friend of the family tells me is mostly Latin-based, with very minimal Slavic roots as one might expect. Due to several Turkish occupations, there are even Arabic influences. So yeah, check out a bit of Romanian.

Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) is a French teacher at a school, and she and her fiance Lucas (Michael Cohen) have bought a dilapidated chateau in the countryside which they are in the process of fixing up. It's beautiful and it's huge, and there's no one for miles around. No wonder people emmigrate to France for the space and low housing prices! Anyway, one night Clementine is disturbed first by a weird phone call, then by noises outside. A mysterious gang of attackers descend upon the chateau for reasons unknown and wreak havoc for the young couple.

Even for the surprisingly brief portion of the movie that actually takes place in the house, Ils provides little reference point for The Strangers, other than the basic premise of a young couple in an isolated house being terrorised by assailants unknown. And the only slight oddity of this premise is the small group being attacked. And that's only because the genre usually likes as many pick-offs as possible. But the movie, like its antagonists, is in it for the hunt - the kill is a mere afterthought. And writers/directors Xavier Palud and David Moreau's script and direction make thorough use of the terrifyingly vast spaces where attackers could be lurking.

This movie relies far less on jump scares like The Strangers did, and despite the latter's phony use of the old 'violent crime in America' statistics and implication that it is an act of charity which could help avoid similar things happening, Ils really addresses the situation with realism. Being on this turf, you should already know that this is a ***SPOILER ALERT*** zone, but I'll just put it out there, as the point of this movie requires me to give away twisty details. These antagonists turn out to be children, a small gang of varying ages, who carry out a carefully orchestrated attack against innocent people for no apparent reason. But in court, the children justify their cruelty by saying, "they wouldn't play with us." It is this point that leads one to believe this is far more than your average stalker/slasher. Like Eden Lake, it seems to be making a social statement.

Not only is this a creepy movie whose point is driven further home by the entire possibility of it, but it is vocal, and says to me that the entitled attitudes of the younger generation can have tragically detrimental effects on their social development. In other words, if kids are allowed to command adults and get their own way, what is to stop them going on such criminal rampages as a tantrum?