Most recent double feature:
Kids These Days (aka. "Hoodie Horror") with
Ils (
Them) and
Eden Lake.
For those who aren't familiar, "hoodie horror" is this weird little subgenre that sprang up in Europe (especially the UK) during the mid-2000s. It typically features working class youths (the "chav" stereotype) as the central threat of the film, playing on middle-class anxieties about poor kids and societal decay. Other examples include
Cherry Tree Lane,
Heartless, and
Citadel.
Ils (Them)
Summary - Clementine, a French teacher who has recently relocated to Bucharest, drives out to meet her lover, Lucas, at their isolated country home. In the middle of the night, they find themselves under siege by mysterious hooded attackers who torment the couple and eventually invade their home. Typical home invasion hijinks ensue.
Thoughts - This one is a pared-down, reasonably effective little home invasion story. There's no real rhyme or reason to what's going on; the characters are just unlucky enough to be the target on this particular night. The film is actually pretty minimalist when it comes to explicit violence, though that doesn't keep the characters from getting put through the wringer. The pacing works, and the climax of the film is appropriately horrifying.
In terms of the social subtext, it's not as explicitly classist as other hoodie horror films. In fact, class isn't really addressed at all, save for the fact that the two protagonists are your typical comfortably middle class, attractive couple. Instead, it seems to play on a more generic fear of kids in general. Granted, a lot of those fears come from the same place as the more class-based examples in stuff like
Eden Lake and
Citadel, but it's diluted a little bit here into a form which doesn't feel quite as gross.
It's a nasty, mean little film, and a lot of it is stuff you've probably already seen in other home invasion films, but it does what it's trying to do reasonably well.
Eden Lake
Summary - Jenny (Kelly Reilly), a nursery school teacher, and her boyfriend Steve (Michael Fassbender) head out to a flooded quarry/lake in the English countryside. As they spend the day at the lakeside, they encounter a gang of surly teenagers and their dog who harass the couple. Over the course of several encounters, tensions between the couple and the gang escalate, eventually leading to violence and pursuit through the isolated woods nearby.
Thoughts - If the class subtext in
Them was a bit diluted, here it's pure and unfiltered. This film has been described as a "Daily Mail fever dream", and it's not hard to see why. All working class British people are violent, ignorant, short-tempered monsters alongside whom the prosperous, photogenic middle-class couple simply cannot coexist. The film even contains, early on, a radio story about concerns over delinquent youth who have gone bad due to inadequate parenting. Later, Jenny and Steve mock the paranoia that leads to the creation of gated communities, which functions as an ironic setup to what comes later.
On a purely technical level, the film is fairly solid. The villains of the piece are abhorrent, and the central couple is sympathetic enough. Some of the violence is legitimately upsetting (one particular scene comes to mind here). The performances work, especially among the kids in the gang.
It's just...ugh. I'm not sure I can get past the really ugly, reactionary underpinnings of the film. It does complicate things a little by having most of the gang members be reluctant participants, only goaded into things by their psychopathic leader, but it's still very much about trying to scare middle class suburbanites with ideas about "THOSE kids". Its final message about generational violence and abuse, which could have been somewhat redemptive, instead feels like it's just piling on more ugliness.
I dunno. I guess it's fairly good at what it does? It's just that what it does plays out like a Daily Mail editorial.
