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One night, French couple Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael
Cohen) notice there is someone lurking around their house, somewhere deep
in the Romanian forests. And before you know it, that someone steals their
car and enters the house. When Lucas goes looking for the intruder though,
his leg is seriously injured - and he and Clémentine realize they are in
grave danger and lock themselves in inside their bathroom, when they find
the intruder is at the other side of the bathroom door, Clémentine looks
for an escape route via the attic and the roof, but she finds the intruder
already waiting for her ... and manages to push him off the roof to his
death - only to encounter there are actually more than one intruders.
Somehow the couple makes it out of the house, but they are separated at
a fence, which Lucas can't climb over because of his injury. It looks as
if he has to stay behind and sacrifice himself for her ... but fate as
decided differently and it's actually Clémentine who is captured by
whoever-it-is, and somehow, despite his injury, Lucas manages to track her
down to the sewers where he kills her tormentor, a kid no older than 15. A
ten-year-old (Alexandru Boghiu) promises to help them escape, but
eventually he leads both of them into a trap, and they are brutally killed
by a gang of pre-teens and teenagers who just want to play, and
who, once they have offed the two, walk to the next bus station as if
nothing had happened.
Ils is not a story-heavy film, its actually little more than an
exercise in tension and suspense - and it works great being just that, and
extremely Spartan and functional shocker that doesn't lose time with
subplots and explanations and cuts pretty much straight to the chase -
almost literally. And in the course of the action the film also shows that
carefully orchestrated suspense and well-placed shocks work way better in
scaring the audience than any amount of gore and detailed depicitons of
torture (even though there's not necessarily anything wrong with that
either). The only thing that actually distracts from thew effectiveness of
the film are the title cards in the epilogue that make a totally
unnecessary attempt to explain everything away after all and link it to an
actually true story - which is the last thing this film needs. But that
doesn't ruin the movie as a whole.
Recommended.
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