Us and Them, a British film that saw general release in the US in March, 2018, is the feature-film directorial debut of Joe Martin, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows three working-class men, Danny (Jack Roth), Tommy (Andrew Tiernan), and Sean (Daniel Kendrick), who decide to invade the home of a wealthy family—patriarch Conrad (Tim Bentinck), wife Margaret (Carolyn Backhouse), and daughter Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun)—for, as it turns out, very different reasons. The trio is lured into crime both by a political rage that is tied to a contemporary moment of widening class inequality and by money, a motive for crime as old as money itself.
Danny is the voice of political resentment and rage. He argues that the time has come for the working classes to take “direct political action” by targeting the top 1% who, he tells us more than once, own as much as the bottom 50% in the UK. “Things have to change,” he says, trying to urge his friends, in a long speech he gives them in the local pub, to see Conrad, a financier, as a “political target.” Danny’s plan, not exactly meticulously thought-out, is to terrorize the wealthy family, forcing Conrad to choose which of his wife or daughter will play Danny’s seemingly deadly game of roulette. His intent is to videotape the “game” and then broadcast it along with his political statement. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as Danny intended. Neither his victims nor his partners in crime acquiesce in his agenda.
Check out the trailer here:
Us and Them is a powerful and provocative film—and I’m actually pretty astonished it hasn’t gotten more praise, that it isn’t being talked about more. It’s beautifully and stylishly made, and it serves up an homage to some equally great predecessors, albeit with a twist. One way to see Us and Them, for instance, is as a kind of 2010s political successor to Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). Danny and his friends evoke Shaun and his slacker friend, although they are less complacent, less willing to shamble on with their deadening and impoverished lives. In light of our post-financial-crisis heightened political times, Danny and his friends are better able than Shaun to voice what’s wrong and do something about it. They’re not passively waiting for the apocalypse to spur them to action. Danny’s well able to articulate his outrage that a few wealthy people have all the resources sown up, that multi-millionaire bankers can screw up (and screw the little people) and then expect the taxpayers to bail them out. Danny refuses Conrad’s justification for his excessive wealth—that he’s worked hard for it—by saying he works hard too. Danny is pissed off, in short, and he can voice his anger.
Jack Roth as the disenfranchised and pissed off Danny
Us and Them is also a pretty straight up home invasion film, evoking, especially, Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997, 2007) and The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008). Indeed, in its sense of itself as film, delivering some self-conscious split screen moments, Us and Them very directly acknowledges Funny Games. Us and Them’s directly referenced pedigree reminds us that home invasion films before this current decade, like The Strangers and Funny Games, exploited the pointed lack of motive of its marauders: both Bertino’s and Haneke’s films, after all, offered up the horror of inscrutable killers and purely random invasions. Us and Them, on the other hand, features overdetermined motives, and the invasion is far from random. Us and Them thus substitutes the horror of economic inequality and class warfare for a violence that ensues from sheer malevolence and whose victims are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Conrad, Margaret, and Phillipa as the carefully chosen victims
For all its obvious politics, the actual message of Us and Them is actually not as clear as it could be, and that’s a good thing. Joe Martin tempers the didacticism of his protagonist with characters and a plot that pull in multiple directions and that provide a complexity that is more than Danny, with his clear and simple message. (One of the title cards, later in the film, reads “COMPLICATIONS.”) The stark binary of the title—Us and Them—is muddied, for instance, when Danny’s partners don’t comply with his goals—and things happen that hark back to a long history of class struggle being compromised from within. Us and Them demonstrates, in the end, that it’s very hard to actually maintain a politics of “Us and Them.” While I can see some viewers who may espouse Danny’s outrage having trouble with where the film goes, I think Us and Them is much better for acknowledging the complex reality of class-based politics.
Andrew Tiernan in a great performance as Tommy, who’s more than he at first appears
Us and Them is a must-watch. And, for literary buffs, there’s a great scene in the middle with William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” narrated over it. It’s a moment that raises how difficult it is to separate out tigers from lambs.
Grade: A
You can stream Us and Them on Amazon:
And for those interested in other films that offer up politically-driven horror, all of them post-2010, there’s Undocumented (2010), Green Room (2015), the Purge franchise (2013-2018), 13 Sins (2014), Desierto (2015), Get Out (2017), The Belko Experiment (2017), Most Beautiful Island (2017), and Mayhem (2017).
