Reviewing a TV series at a film festival is always a tricky bit of business, as it finds the film critic, used to appraising an entire work, engaging in a combination of critique and prediction – I think the rest of these will be good/bad, too! (One can argue, of course, that television critics do this all the time, and that’s accurate; it would follow that they’re very different skill sets.) It gets particularly difficult when you’re talking about something like “Them,” Amazon Prime’s new horror drama anthology series, because its first season (subtitled “Covenant”) will be a self-contained story. SXSW debuted the first two episodes, running a feature-length 107 minutes – and frankly, the series would benefit from either showing us more or showing us less.
Indeed, the first episode plays like the first half of a feature: tight, smart, and gripping. Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas star as, respectively, Henry and Livia (aka “Lucky”) Emory, heads of one of the millions of African-American families that participated in the Great Migration, relocating from Chattanooga to California in 1953 in search of greener pastures – and to leave some truly heinous events in the rearview. They settle down in Compton, then an all-white enclave; racism was literally in the contract for home purchases, but by 1953, such covenants were no longer legally enforceable. “A little red ink and those words disappear,” promises the real estate agent (Brooke Smith from “The Silence of the Lambs,” in a juicy cameo). “This house is yours.”
Their new neighbors aren’t so sure. The mouth-agape stares that greet the Emory family on their first drive in quickly escalate to hours-long vigils of intimidation and harassment on their front lawn. Leading the charge is Betty Wendell (Alison Pill), the neighborhood busybody, who sees the arrival of this one Black family as the end of the neighborhood. “This is how it begins. How it changes. With one family,” she warns her fellow suburbanites. “If they’re allowed to get comfortable, they start making phone calls. And then there’s another family, and then another.” She’s not pulling punches: “We’re going to do something about it.”
But “Them” isn’t merely a story of neighborhood integration – though it does that quite well. (The opening credits make clever use of red lines drawn on city maps.) But when the family dog enters the new home and immediately starts sniffing at the door to the basement, certain questions arise: why was this real estate agent willing to break the rules and make this sale? Did something… happen in the house? Is the deeply creepy thing waiting in the shadows for the youngest daughter in the middle of the night her imaginary friend, or something more sinister?
These supernatural elements dovetail nicely with the strong sociopolitical text because they manage to throw everything into the air. Yes, vile racists have targeted them, but this family is also in real danger of just seeming crazy, or combustible, or both. (These early episodes only yield a couple of genuine horror interludes, but they’re terrifying.) And the craft is tip-top; director Nelson Cragg assembles these episodes with style, creating striking compositions and making clever (but sparing) use of split-screens, while leaning into the bright ‘50s template. And it’s easy to complain that it looks too clean or too immaculate – the colors too bright, the cars and clothes not quite lived in – that cleanliness also feels right, like they’re presenting an untouched myth, not a grimy reality.
Performances are impressive across the board as well. Ayorinde and Thomas (both Brits, natch) are doing nuanced, multi-layered character work here, showing us who these two are with each other, who they present themselves to the world as, and (in flashbacks) who they used to be. And to their credit, writers (and executive producers, along with Lena Waithe and several others) David Matthews and Little Marvin don’t just make generic villains out of their antagonists; they bother to give them differences and dimensions, particularly Pill’s Betty. It’s a rich performance, a portrait of absolute over-the-top whiteness (the look on her face when they arrive, and the fake, frozen smile as she raises a hand to return a hello, speak volumes), but you also get a sense of the inner emptiness that drives her.
Yet it’s also hard to determine how these materials will make for a full, compelling season of television. If, as mentioned, the first episode feels like the set-up for a great movie, the second has the feeling of said movie being haphazardly adapted into a series, introducing all sorts of new strands and ideas and bits of backstory that have the cumulative effect of flattening that airtight first installment, and turning it into yet another flabby binge that overstays its welcome. Maybe “Them” recovers, or synthesizes its materials more smoothly. At this point, it could go either way. [B]
“Them” debuts on Amazon Prime Video on April 9.
You can follow along with the rest of our 2021 SXSW coverage here.