I am not going to write about Ils (or Them to give it its anglophonic name) in the hope of getting you to go and see it. In the UK at least, the film has slipped from general release and Im sure it will soon slip from cinemas altogether if it has not done so already. Given that Ils is a 78 minute French film boasting no stars and inexperienced directors, this fate was inevitable. I am not a man to throw down against fate, but I will write about Ils in the hope that you pick up the DVD when it appears as this low budget French/Romanian production has enough about it to overcome its minor problems to deserve a place alongside such French thrillers as Dominik Moll's Harry, Hes Here to Help (2000) and Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension (2003).
Hip, beautiful French couple Lucas (Michael Cohen) and Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) have taken over a palatial house in Romania. Living in just a few (albeit trendily decorated) rooms while the house is done up, Clementine teaches in a French school while Lucas works on a novel. One night their idyllic life is interrupted when strange noises begin to echo round their house... someone or something has come for them and it will not stop until it gets what it wants.
Whether Lucas is a great writer or Clementine a successful teacher, we do not know. All we know is that the couple are wealthy, childless and seem to be living the European dream of globalisation in that they've sold up their place in an expensive Western city and made the most of the low property prices in Eastern Europe to live like Royalty. Lucas lives a life of quiet indolence, not even bothering to go shopping and seemingly only wanting booze and sex from life. Clementine might well have moved to Romania but she is still a part of "La Francophonie", teaching French in a French school where she speaks French with her colleagues before going home to her French partner.
When the attack begins, we do not know who it is that is attacking the wealthy middle-class childfree couple. Nor do we know what they want or why it is that they are doing it. In fact, we are not even sure if the attackers are human and therefore subject to empathy or human modes of cognition. This is interesting as in US horror, the traditional victims tended to be either nuclear families (The Hills Have Eyes) or innocent teenagers (Nightmare on Elm Street). Such groups were selected because they seemed to be completely blameless and innocent. Indeed, this is one reason why (as Scream pointed out) that couples that have sex during a horror film are usually certain to wind up dead. Ils' choice of victim is similarly intriguing as the film seems to suggest that it is young middle class childfree couples that are completely blameless and innocent. They probably even drink fair trade coffee.
Unlike many horror films, Ils does not rely upon the traditional surge and retreat structure. Films such as The Blair Witch Project will traditionally keep the tension on a quite short leash, allowing it to build and then cleansing the pallet with some character building until the next attack. Ils differs from this traditional structure by ramping up the tension incredibly quickly, moving from the calm of sleep to outright terror in only a few short minutes and then keeping the audience there until the end of the film.
The scares start incredibly strongly as the directors subtly subvert the old cliche of the house under siege (Night of the living Dead) by replacing the omnipresence of the aggressors with the omnipresence of the sound of the aggressors, to whit the strange dehumanising sound of shouts and rattles that the attackers use to further terrify their prey. The couple are safely shut into their bedroom and bathroom but they cannot escape the noises that seem to come from everywhere. When the couple flee the house and begin running through the woods and the vast sewer network, the spell is broken and one starts to realise quite how thin Ils' material really is. Indeed, Them is built around a single pure structural idea and the directors realise this, hence the short running time. However, even at 78 minutes, the film feels slightly long, not least because the forest and the D&D-style sewers are such familiar horror film settings that they struggle to provide the kind of top quality scares that come during the films initial vignette. However, while the film undeniably starts strongly before fizzling out, it is not actually the film's structure or actual ability to scare that makes it interesting.
As the film reaches its ending, Lucas tracks Clementine through the sewers by the sounds of her screaming, leading both us and clearly him to think that she is being raped or murdered. However, when Lucas does come across Clementine he finds her simply being held down by a teenager who is pressing a plastic bag to her face and laughing while another child says that he should not hurt her. As we then discover, "Them" are not supernatural creatures or the traditional tribe of psychopaths but children who want to play and do not understand why the adults will not join in with their fun... the kind of fun enjoyed by children in Lord of the Flies or in Louis Pergauds novel of childhood brutality The War of the Buttons. When the identity of the attackers is finally revealed, it is easy to feel that this is something of an anti-climax. The problem is that, robbed of the genres natural ebb and flow, Ils is unable to sustain the same levels of tension for a whole hour, let alone build the tension towards this type of films traditional climax. The result is that rather than hitting us with the grand reveal when we are most prone to being surprised, the grand reveal comes after at least half an hour of gradual decline. So rather than prompting the audience to go "They're kids! OMG!" the directors merely get a "Oh... kids... interesting". However, setting aside the issue of the emotional impact of the film and the auxiliary issue of whether or not the film really is based upon real life events as it claims, the idea of children tracking down and murdering adults is an interesting one.
Whether they intend it or not, horror films tend to serve as cultural weathervanes by identifying sources of malaise in the cultures that produce them. Good examples of this might be the tension between educated Americans and ignorant rednecks in Herschel Gordon Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs or the gap between the mainstream and the counterculture in Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. We might even mention the football-driven antipathy between the English and the Scottish explored in Dog Soldiers. Ils is notable for reflecting the fears of modern middle class Europeans.
Romania joined the European Union on the first of January but it will no doubt be a while before it frees itself of the perception that it, along with the other members of the Warsaw Pact or the Former Soviet Union, is somehow Other. Between the wars in the Balkans and the Iron Curtain, there has emerged a really tangible sense that many of the nations within the continent of Europe are somehow not European. The most obvious example of this is the opposition to the idea of Turkey joining the European Union. The opposition is not economic but largely cultural. Spurred on by right wing tabloids, many people feel that letting Turkey in to the club will somehow undermine it and put all of its members at risk. While Turkeys Muslim population and traditional inclusion in the Arabic sphere of control rather than the European may serve to exacerbate this difference, there is a difference nonetheless; a difference as real as that between urban Americans and rural Americans. The story of Lucas and Clementine is essentially the story of what many fear will happen if the European Union moves too far from its white western origins. As good Europeans, Lucas and Clementine have moved across the open borders of Europe and have set themselves up in a beautiful Romanian house. However, neither Clementine nor Lucas full engage with Romania as Clementine teaches in a French school and Lucas seemingly doesnt go out and for their troubles the couple are hunted down and killed by the young Romanians with their completely alien motivations and beliefs. To the Romanian kids, it seems completely alien to suggest that they did anything wrong... they were just playing. In their brutality, their youth and their role and psychological Others, the children represent Rumsfelds New Europe.
Another interesting fact about Old Europe is its shrinking birth-rate. Many European nations now have birth-rates below replacement level, that means that were it not for immigration then their populations would be shrinking. This fact is made all the more stark when you realise that even these low birth-rates are artificially inflated by the first and second generation naturalised immigrants who frequently have larger families than the norm. In essence, Old Europe is not breeding as much as it used to. This demographical trend has resulted in the emergence of a group known as the Childfree. Referred to by marketers are DINKs (dual income, no kids) or THINKERs (twin high income, no kids, early retirement), the childfree have chosen not to have children. Clementine and Lucas fit the profile of a childfree couple to a tee. Educated, wealthy, enjoying artistic lifestyles, the couple exist in an entirely adult world. Even Clementine, who teaches, has a position of authority over children and expresses her frustration with her charges, revelling in the fact that she forced them to do dictation, which calmed them right down. For the childfree, the arrival of an unwanted child would be nothing short of devastating as their whole lifestyle would have to change. For the childfree, children are the Other. They arrive dripping with bodily fluids, unable to speak and constantly screaming they are completely alien and inhuman. Even when they grow up, the process of cognitive development means that parents are forced to spend a number of years effectively sharing a house with a small psychopath incapable of feeling empathy or seeing things from anyone elses point of view. When the Romanian children arrive in the lives of Clementine and Lucas they shatter the couples carefully crafted lifestyle and wreak havoc across their immaculately decorated home, eventually forcing them out of their home and into the woods and the sewers. The arrival of children for this childfree couple is not just a catastrophe, it is also final as it kills them stone dead. The carefree childfree couple that bought the house is killed off by the arrival of children.
Both of these sets of fears are incredibly contemporary and are particularly salient to a European audience. Despite Ils lack of real substance and its tendency to fizzle out at the end as the directors simply run out of ideas, it is notable in that it tries to tap into real modern fears rather than recycle the fears of past generations and other places. Ils is a proper European horror film and as such it is most definitely worthy of your time.
Bravo Mr. McCalmont!
This is the best piece of writing and review I'm read in decades.
Posted by: Kevin Dineen | May 09, 2007 at 03:06 AM
Thank you very much :-) I'm glad you enjoyed the review.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | May 09, 2007 at 10:20 AM
Fantastic Review!!
...emailed to my friends, and bookmarked!
Posted by: anonymous | June 26, 2008 at 05:39 AM