AMONG THE LIVING – Ever since 'Inside', Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo have been flying in the face of their fans' unrealistic expectations – good for them. I liked 'Livide' even though everyone else said it was a muddled mess, and I have to say that I enjoyed 'Among The Living', which quite a few reviewers have written off as half baked. For some, the attempt here to marry pre-adolescent drama with horror has come off badly. I might be wrong, but just because a film references 'The Goonies' a couple of times doesn't mean that it has to justify itself by ripping a foetus out of someone's stomach every five minutes. Ironically and somewhat teasingly there IS a bit of foetus ripping in the first five minutes of 'Among The Living' when a haggard Beatrice Dalle flips out and tries to kill her young ones, but again, those looking for an 'Inside' style gore bonanza will be disappointed to learn that the film is more about the struggles of a gang of three alienated kids. That's not to say there isn't plenty of creepiness on offer. It just needs time to build. After the brutal opening, the tone is subdued, for a while at least – we get to know the kids and their messed up lives a bit. We follow them as they bum about setting fire to barns and trespassing in abandoned film studios (which appear to be a staple on the outskirts of every small French town). The kids antagonise a fugitive father-son duo (basically, Dalle's ex-family) who've been using the studios as their murder grotto, and from then the film gathers momentum as the disturbing looking son, a bald guy who walks around naked, tracks each of the kids down in turn. The last half hour is pretty fraught and tense, and manages to pack in a bit of the ultraviolence the filmmakers have been accused of forsaking. But, in a film which is nodding more to the otherly and the macabre, what sticks in the mind are images such as bald creep forcing his foot into the mouth of a prone, dying father, or treading 'meaningfully' on a squeaky toy. It may play on standard genre themes like 'the family as the source of horror' and does the whole thing of showing a brutal family as the mirror / equivalent of a 'realistic' one but it does so with a more evolved sense of what that might mean, and to their credit Maury and Bustillo inject pathos into the ostensible bad guys in a way which avoids cheese and seems to evoke real fragility. I think it's a good film, and I recommend it.
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