Them (2006)

Them, released in 2006 and known in its native France as Ils, opens with a title card promising that the following events actually happened. The claim is, by most accounts, decorative. A pair of French expatriates, Clémentine and Lucas, occupy a remote house near Bucharest, and across a single night a group of hooded figures terrorizes them through the attic, the woods, and finally the sewers. It runs eighty minutes. It wastes very few of them.

For those of us who catalog the cultural weather of a picture, this one is a clean read. The cast is white, French and Romanian, and nobody pauses to discuss it. No character announces an identity, corrects a prejudice, or explains an oppressive system to a captive audience. The killers are children, which rules out the usual corporate villainy, and the forest is not a metaphor for anything except forest. Clémentine fights back with a poker and a shard of glass, which is standard survival arithmetic and not a thesis. She endures on instinct, not on principle. There is no lesson in the ending, only a bus full of hooded boys and one girl, and a line of dialogue that explains nothing on purpose.

There is a temptation, when a film is this efficient, to credit it with hidden intelligence. Resist. Them is a machine for tightening the chest, and it does that job with a craftsman's indifference to meaning. It has no message to impart, no sermon to deliver, and no interest in being anything except frightening. In an era when even the slasher film stops to explain itself, that restraint reads almost as a period piece. We score it accordingly, file it under lean and unpersuaded, and move on to the next.