Ils (2006) - film review

Clémentine and Lucas are a young French couple who have been living in Bucharest for several months.  She works as a teacher, he is a writer.  They live in a secluded mansion, miles from the nearest town.  One night, Clémentine is awoken by a strange noise. Convinced that someone has broken into the house, she awakes Lucas and he sets out to explore the dark, sprawling building.  As he feared, Lucas finds evidence of intruders, but they seem strangely reluctant to show themselves.  The nightmare has just begun...

Supposedly based on a true story, Ils is a superlative example of the psycho-thriller/horror genre that first became popular in the early 1970s and gained some measure of respectability with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).  Director John Carpenter developed the genre into what we now term the slasher thriller by introducing graphic violence with his film Halloween (1978).  Recently the genre has become increasingly gory and disgusting, to the extent that the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) now looks almost as innocent and inoffensive as an episode of the sitcom Terry and June.  Ils takes a step or two back from all this gratuitous blood letting (and casual decapitation / limb hacking) and shows that a far, far more effective thriller can be achieved as a result. 

It is worth noting that this is a genre that it is exceptionally rare in French cinema.  The only similar film of note is Alexandre Aja’s Haute tension (2003), although this veers towards Grand Guignol excess and appears unintentionally funny in some of its more violent sequences.  By contast, Ils is far more restrained, with less violence depicted on screen than you would find in the average Tom and Jerry cartoon.  The reason why the film is so effective, and so utterly compelling, is because most of the horror the spectator experiences whilst watching this film comes from his or her own imagination.  Horror is so much more terrifying when it comes from the murky depths of our own consciousness. This, after all, is where nightmares are born.  

The subtle approach adopted by debut filmmakers David Moreau and Xavier Palud for this film actually serves the subject of the film very well indeed.  The real enemy that the two protagonists face here is their fear, not their human persecutors.  Their inability to cope with their fear and deal with the threat that faces them in a rational way is what propels them to their doom.  In most films of this kind, the victims are tormented by someone of almost superhuman evil, someone who (incredibly) knows their every move and has an implausible knack of knowing just which corner to hide round.  Here, the victims are their own tormenters.  It is blind fear that drives them to panic and plunges them into a living nightmare, making survival a virtual impossibility.  Ils is a stunning film that reminds us just how dangerous and destructive fear can be if we allow it to run riot.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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