"Them" on Amazon Prime
It's the 1950s and an aspirational Black family from North Carolina suffers a terrible loss and moves to an all-White neighborhood in the East Compton suburb of Los Angeles. The father (Ashley Thomas) is a war veteran and an engineer, the mom (Deborah Ayorinde), a former teacher, the teenage daughter (Shahadi Wright Joseph), smart and pretty, and the younger daughter (Melody Hurd), adorable, but the family's reception at the idyllic neighborhood of pastel ranch houses with perfect lawns is horrifying from the start, largely due to a bitter, neglected housewife (Allison Pill) who is determined to drive them out, along with supernatural forces determined to drive them crazy.
I am of two minds about this series. It is poorly done in many ways yet is so compelling and impressive in others that I think it's worth watching. The cinematography is vibrant, reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining, and the acting is terrific, as though it were written for actors to show their skills. But the pace is tiresome, the emotions unbalanced. We get very little time to know the characters outside of the scenes of desperation, madness, and violence. At the core of the story is a horrific crime that is teased early on but not revealed until a flashback more than halfway through. That alone is enough to make this a good realistic horror story and the supernatural element seemed gratuitous and annoying until the next-to-last episode, which could stand as a fascinating movie on its own.
Having watched the whole series, I think it suffers from bringing too many dramatic elements together. It's overloaded, overwrought and messy. But the same could be said about race-relations in this country, both in the 1950s and still today. Even the supernatural side of it bears a message and a sense of history. It can be a slog at times to watch, but if you stick to the end, I think it's worthwhile. I noticed that a lot of the Amazon reviews considered the racial atrocities to be over-the-top and "divisive" but as disturbing as they were, I didn't think they were unrealistic. I've heard true stories just as bad and I don't think the filmmakers veered far beyond depicting the capacity of those who can dehumanize their fellow humans so completely.
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You've done an excellent review.
A lot of things will finally make sense, including one character that I thought had a terribly exaggerated accent.
