'Them' has nothing to do with giant ants, ok?

It's kinda difficult to tell you about this without giving too much away..however..

It is a French made film made on location in Romania (in French and Romanian with English subs). The film opens with a pre title sequence of a mum and her stroppy teenage daughter on a country road at night near Snagov (about 40km north of Bucharest for the geographically challenged). They have an minor accident and mum gets out and has a look under the bonnet/hood asking daughter to turn the ignition over a couple of times. When the daughter calls out "What should I do now" and no reply is forthcoming she gets out and discovers her mum has vanished. Getting scared she gets back in the car and locks herself in as someone or something starts throwing mud at the windows..but, as is the way in situations like this..she never checked the back seat before locking herself in.

We now go to Bucharest and meet Clementine, a French national teaching French to Romanian kids. We watch her drive home...past the abandoned car we saw in the pre title sequence..and to the huge remote farmhouse her and her partner, Lucas, have recently bought and are renovating.

Once they go to bed Clem hears all sorts of strange noises outside..waking Lucas they investigate.

From this point on (about 20 mins into the film) it becomes one long game of cat and mouse as someone..or something..starts to f*ck with their minds turning the TV on and off.. and making weird noises etc. We see strange shadowy figures moving about behind Clem and Lucas who take refuge in the attic before getting out the house and into the pitch black surrounding woodland.

From here on it's a bit Blair Witch...shaky camera work..so dark you can barely see what's happening as they run blindly through the woods and eventually (after getting seperated) into a disused drainage/sewage system of underground tunnels.

I can't really tell you any more without giving away the "shock disclosure"...but I had sussed out who/what was stalking them half way through the film.

This doesn't quite live up to the DVD box blurb of 'You'll never feel safe in your home again'..and 'Truly terrifying' but the fact that it is supposed to be based on a true story adds a bit of a frisson to the proceedings. Having been to Romania on a number of occasions maybe I am better qualified to be able to accept the final disclosure whereas some people (not least those on the IMDb message boards) found it a bit of an anti-climax..even a cop-out.

You be the judge..it's only 77 mins long...and I can think of far longer and far worse films to sit through....


EDIT:

I found this on another site about this film. I didn't have time to view the extras on the DVD but someone who has writes:

Police Press Conference with Victim's Sister (1:40)
Hmm. As anyone who has seen the poster will know, Them is supposedly based on a real incident and the locations and characters are thus claimed to true to the original story. If this is the case then I can't be the only one wondering if maybe, just maybe, such dramatisation of a not so long ago event is crossing that exploitation line. The problem is that the whole 'based on a true story' thing is a favourite horror movie tagline that sometimes turns out to be fabricated hype (The Blair Witch Project being the most notorious example). The brief extract from a press conference in which the victim's sister makes an appeal for information may seem genuine enough - and if it is then this should convince a few more that the filmmakers are in iffy territory - but the blurred-out face, the complete lack of details on the 'real' case elsewhere on the disc and on the official web site, and the absence of even a suggestion of such a link in the Making Of documentary (the directors go into some detail on the writing process) prompts me to smell a big, deceptive rat.

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