ILS (THEM)
(Review)

Like Open Water and Wolf Creek before it, Ils (Them) is a short, savage little number based on a true story.
In it, a French couple, Clementine Sauveur (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas Medev (Michael Cohen), recently relocated to Snagov, Romania, are terrorized in their home by unknown assailants.

For anyone who’s read my review of Open Water (reVIEW 23; see Archive: September 2007), you may very well come to the conclusion that these sort of films don’t particularly float my boat. These are the sort of films that, even as the end credits begin to roll, I nearly always find myself asking, Well, what was the point of it all?
Here, the assailants are portrayed decidedly as Other, since the narrative’s focus is locked onto Clementine and Lucas. And since the film covers only the event itself—the aftermath limited to short blocks of text before the end credits—we don’t really get to delve into the motivations, the “why” of it.
So the film’s end-all, be-all is the tension engendered by the action onscreen. This is, perhaps, its point: to make our pulses quicken and keep us on the edge of our seats. (And on occasion, get us to jump out of those aforementioned seats.)
And if this is Ils’ point, it’s raison d’etre, then its existence is justified.

The film itself is a tense little bugger, and the credit for that achievement should go to co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud. It’s because of this skilled handling of the narrative’s suspense that I found this a better cinematic experience than either Open Water or Wolf Creek.
In addition, the fact that the next project of Moreau and Palud is the upcoming English-language remake of Khon Hen Phi (The Eye), gives me a healthy sense of anticipation for it. And yes, I am aware that Jessica Alba headlines the redux, so for me to actually say I have “a healthy sense of anticipation” for The Eye should say volumes about just how impressed I was by Moreau and Palud’s achievement on Ils. (I’m also extremely grateful that Parker Posey and Alessandro Nivola are in The Eye, so I can at least be assured I’ll be seeing some good acting.)
With The Eye, Moreau and Palud will have more of an actual plot at their disposal, and I’m curious to see how they handle a story (as opposed to the situation presented in Ils).

In the meantime though, what we ultimately have in Ils is a sobering and unnerving thrillride. After all, as with Open Water and Wolf Creek, this is the dramatized version of an actual event, with the fates of real people up on the screen for us to see.
As I said in my Open Water review, this sort of material isn’t “entertainment” in my books. To witness actual persons in this sort of context seems somehow wrong for me.
If, however, you’re up for this sort of horror, then Ils is definitely your ticket.

(Ils DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Them OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

reVIEW (23)
OPEN WATER

Daniel and Susan (Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan) are off on a hastily-planned vacation, little knowing that they will face an ordeal that will test their will and resolve, an unpredictable twist of fate that leaves them stranded in shark-infested Open Water.

Shot by director/writer Chris Kentis with a regular camcorder—which gives it the look and feel of a faux documentary—Open Water is a decidedly uncomfortable film experience. Which is not to say it’s a bad film; it isn’t. The performances and the dialogue are rather good, giving us real people to identify with, as opposed to the annoyingly bland ciphers we had to endure in The Blair Witch Project, one of the films Open Water has been compared with. (More on that later.)
It’s just that it’s a film I don’t really care to watch a second time. Now, I’ve watched other films that I feel are far more harrowing than Open Water. Darren Aronofsky’s blisteringly hypnotic Requiem for a Dream and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible come to mind, but the former is a horribly effective cautionary tale against drugs, and the latter’s storytelling technique (story’s end first, working our way towards the story’s beginning, ala Memento) manages to at least elevate the sordid material. Actually, Requiem also boasts of Aronofsky’s visionary and kaleidoscopic storytelling technique, so I think that’s an important point.
Technique.

Not that technique is totally absent from Open Water, but other than a stand-out sequence as we near midnight (the couple having been drifting for over half a day), most of the film is presented to us in a pretty straight-forward manner, contributing greatly to its documentary feel. Now, some may argue that without fancy camera movements and angles and MTV-editing, we are not distracted from the story. My problem here is this is not so much a story as it is a situation.
At the risk of generalizing, a film can either entertain, or it can actually say something; sometimes, a film can do both. Now, though what is “entertainment” is largely a subjective thing (I may think South Park is entertaining—and I may think it says something too—but to others, it may just be crass and offensive; in the same way, what others may find entertaining could be, for me, some Hollywood feel-good claptrap) but watching the discomfort and agony of two people is certainly not entertainment in my books.
And since the majority of the film is just us watching the poor couple suffer, we are even left with an unwelcome sense of having been a perverse and sadistic voyeur to the proceedings. The fact that the film is based on a real-life incident makes the viewing experience even less savoury: two people really were abandoned out in the middle of nowhere.
Open Water doesn’t seem to say anything either (except perhaps that bad things happen for no good reason). So if it doesn’t entertain, and it doesn’t really say anything significant or profound, then what is it there for? All it really seems to do is document an unfortunate couple’s suffering without leaving any signposts to tell us how this could have all been avoided.

Now, the film has been glibly described by some as “Jaws meets The Blair Witch Project,” which is really doing a disservice to Jaws, still one of Spielberg’s best, after all these years. Open Water though, does resemble Project (but it is a better film, if that’s any consolation). Both are low-budget films that really don’t have a story per se, but just throw individuals—and the audience—into an uncomfortable, tension-filled situation, and let the cards fall where they may.
And though I do believe horror is the great democratic leveler of all, and is there to jostle us and wake us up from complacency, I also want a story as the foundation and framework upon which that horror will be draped, not some situation. (Also one of the big problems I had with The Blair Witch Project.)
In the end though, if you intend to watch Open Water, prepare yourself for an unpleasant experience. And don’t expect any kind of comfort or even sense to the proceedings. This is a document of suffering, plain and simple.

(Open Water OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Terror on the High Seas, Agony at the Multiplex.”)