Them (2006)

As you can probably tell from the image above, this is not the wonderful 1954 film about giant ants.  Instead it is Ils, a French-Romanian film about a young couple terrorised in their isolated home by a mostly-unseen group of attackers.

Because the film's premise requires that there be only two characters for much of its run time, we begin with a largely unrelated sequence where a mother and daughter are forced off the road late at night, and then killed.  This five minutes or so relates to the main plot only in that one of the main characters sees the dead women's car the next day, and the perpetrators of the attack are presumably the same group.  The sequence does however establish the main basic shot of the film, which is to have the camera linger on the face of a terrified person as they glance wildly around, nervously reacting to every slightly-too-loud bit of background noise.

That probably sounds dismissive, and on some level it is.  Them/Ils is fundamentally a very slight film, content-wise.  In that regard, it is something of a triumph of style and technique over substance, as it does genuinely build and maintain tension through much of its relatively short run time.  On the other hand, the actual specifics of the plot are more than a little shaky, and its sympathetic characters are drawn in only the sketchiest of manner.  In the latter case, I'm reminded of James Herbert's The Rats, where he would repeatedly introduce a character, give you a page of backstory on them, then have them savagely killed and eaten by mutant rodents.

Of course, sometimes less is more.  The lack of information we have about the attackers is part of what makes them scary, and frankly the more the film reveals about them the less effective they become as a source of menace.  I suspect the movie would be even more effective if we never learned anything about them at all.

At the end of the day, if you just want a scary movie and you are willing to switch your higher cognitive functions off to get that animal brain chill thrill, then Them delivers.