Quote:
Originally Posted by Cemetery Attendant
For one, it's called intelligent, but I fail to see anything intelligent about it. The concept was extremely simple, there was little to no character depth and over 3/4ths or so of the movie consisted of a chase.
The plot is something you could come up with half awake.
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Simplicity makes the best slasher films. Think about the iconic Halloween. Just a single big bad terrorizing a neighborhood.
It's when writers and directors attempt to add motivation or turgid story and dialogue that slashers fall short.
Ils was delightfully simple and focused on pure suspense. When you're doing a study in suspense, you don't necessarily
need character depth. Quite frankly, when exploring fear and raw emotion, character depth is incredibly overrated. The point of not focusing on the characters is so that they are seen as the everyman (or every
men here). Most people can empathize and share the fear of Home Invasion, Isolation, Helplessness, Unknown Threats. In the movie, the characters are purposefully
not the focus - The focus is the fear that they feel and making them more anonymous allows the viewer to put themselves in the place of the characters.
Quite frankly, I could care
less what the couple's life is like - I find that, oftentimes when superfluous time is spent on character building, unless there is good acting to back it up I completely root for the characters to die. The pure thought of someone breaking into my house and rending me and my boyfriend helpless... Is absolutely horrifying and I think that
Ils truly embodied that fear.
The reason why the movie is "intelligent" is that simplicity comes OUT of intelligence. The direction was meticulous, purposeful, and well-done. There was no pandering dialogue for people who feel as though they need to CONNECT with the PERSONALITY of the characters - That's the intelligence of it. The clever purposeful decisions that were made to keep it simple and horrifying.