Quentin Tarantino has perfected the art of tough guys having intense and emotional discussions or arguments about pop culture and other odd topics, often while doing horrible and violent things.  It’s a twist on the theme of “the banality of evil,” and he is a master at it.  Us and Them, written and directed by Joe Martin, attempts to replicate that genre and mostly it succeeds, and sometimes it doesn’t, but often it is so much better than it has any right to be it’s astounding.  It’s a helluva great time.

Phillipa and her boyfriend Glen arrive at her parents to get to know each other and enjoy a nice luncheon together.  Glen tries to have a normal conversation with Phillipa’s very wealthy parents, but can’t help poking and prodding at them verbally, trying to get a reaction, an outburst, anything.  The more time they all spend together, the more uncomfortable and ill at ease Phillipa appears. And with good reason: her boyfriend Glen isn’t really her boyfriend Glen. He’s Danny, who, along with his two other thug friends, kidnapped Glen and Phillipa, intending to rob her parents and broadcast their humiliation as an example and a warning to the other upper-upper-class-one-percenters to stop screwing over the little people.

Things, as is their wont, do not go as planned.

As Danny, Jack Roth (Tim Roth’s son) does a marvelous job. It’s rare when you start to feel genuine sympathy for someone who is doing tremendously horrible things but for all the right reasons (at least, according to him), but he wrings some real empathy out of his world view. I get why he is so frustrated with the moneyed people who continually crap on everyone below them, even as I hate what he’s doing about it. It’s a high-wire tightrope act that Roth walks, and it’s remarkable.  You really want to hate him for being such a whiny thug, but then you think, “Well, he’s got a point, the upper class really does have too much power….”

Sophie Colquhoun, as Phillipa, has one of the hardest jobs in the film: on edge, emotionally fragile, and, by the end, psychically devastated.  There were moments I was watching her character experience some horrific thing, and she was so realistic in her reactions, my immediate thought was: “Somebody needs to stop this and save her!”  And then I remembered it was only a movie.

But it’s not all darkness and grim horror, far from it. There are some hilarious scenes in this movie, punctuated by title cards like What Phillipa Knows, or Trickle Down, that foreshadow what’s coming up, and also sometimes make a comment about the events as they happen.  There are hilarious conversations going on throughout this film, such as Danny arguing with his mates that the downfall of society is being caused by the abundance of young gentlemen wanking off.

Ahem.

But, boy, when this thing lets loose, it’s like a downhill horror train with no brakes.  By the climax of this movie, Danny is at his wit’s end: nothing has gone right, and his mates are second-guessing him and mumbling to themselves, and that makes him go off the deep end. I was clutching my armrests the last ten minutes or so of Us and Them, so expertly had writer/director Joe Martin led me along the well-lit street of “Oh, isn’t this a cute little crime thriller,” only to take a hard right turn into the darkened alley of, “Oh, this shit isn’t funny anymore.”  That’s a direct quote from my notes.  It’s seriously harrowing.

Us and Them premiered at SXSW on March 10, 2017.  I highly recommend it.