THEY

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Monday, December 02, 2002

The way THEY deals with its scares is symptomatic of the film as a whole. Director Robert Harmon does a great job with creepy ambience, setting up one environment after another that's pure horror movie turf a deserted road next to a concealing wood, a darkened public pool, a subway and succeeds in getting full ominous potential out of the scenery despite the familiarity of the concept. Then, with one exception, he can't quite make the scares pay off. We're primed, but we seldom actually jump. This might be a more acceptable flaw if the dramatic sections weren't so flat and if the characters' investigations and deductions didn't involve so few clues and so much hypothesizing.

Likewise, THEY has a promising premise that eventually collapses due to vague and arbitrary handling and generic characters. As small children, Julia (Laura Regan) and her friend Billy (Jon Abrahams) were plagued by night terrors that stemmed from specific traumatic incidents. Julia has managed to put this behind her and is plowing ahead with her college degree in psych when Billy demands to meet her. He is babbling about how "They" hide in the darkness and can control electricity and phones and make children cry. He caps the speech by committing suicide in front of Julia. Naturally horrified, Julia meets two of Billy's friends, Sam (Ethan Embry) and Terry (Dagmara Dominczyk) at the funeral. They, too, suffered from childhood night terrors and are starting to give some credence to Billy's theory that something marked them as kids and is returning for them now.

So far,

so good. There's a hint that the "darkness" that brings the mysterious entities is emotional as well as physical. However, this winds up not counting for as much as it might in Brendan William Hood's screenplay. Julia's sessions with her psychiatrist deal in generalities, there's a lot of talk that leads to very little in the way of detective work (even in cinema shorthand terms, much less realistically) and the characters persist in behaving not only as though they've never seen a horror movie, but like people who haven't spent their whole lives being (as the plot keeps underscoring) afraid of the dark. We never understand why the monsters can manipulate some environments but not others and why they release their prey in certain instances and go for the kill at other times.

They seems to want to emulate A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, bearing Wes Craven's name as "presenter," and PITCH BLACK, featuring creatures by that film's monster maker Patrick Tatopoulos. Unfortunately, THEY lacks NIGHTMARE's trippy invention (not to mention its memorable villain) and PITCH BLACK's story logic. Irrationality is part of what makes nightmares scary, but THEY is so amorphous that it feels like some good setpieces in search of a throughline.

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