Ils

Saw Ils, a French horror about two adults being terrorized by hoodie-wearing strangers. Despite the lazy-sound premise (as my boyfriend put it: "so they're just people?") the film is quite classy, using jump scares and so on, but feeling very restrained. The hoodie-wearers are correctly never used to shock and horrify. They are ominous only in their numbers and their creepy, feral, rat-like scurrying. Appropriately enough, after the film crystallizes into an action film (as many horrors ultimately do,) the action moves almost entirely underground.

The film is relatively short at 75 minutes and mostly sweet. It's fairly suspenseful and what it lacks in gore it makes up for in ominous-ness (which I prefer anyway.) The concept is a bit weak, but the late-game reveal of who exactly the bad-guys are is interesting and enduringly creepy, so stick around. The film feels classy to me (though it may simply be that I'm being fooled by the foreign language.) Most of the action takes place in a beautifully crumbling chateau and the film is much more about home-invasion anxieties than it is about red corn syrup. It austerely keeps the baddies hidden from sight almost entirely and the final twist is too weak to be the focus of the film, but leaves a nice little bitter aftertaste. A nice horror.