The Owners — The Owners
The Owners appeared last year and was the first feature from French director Julius Berg. The films based on the 2011 French graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine Lune( A Full Moons Night) by legendary comic artist Hermann Huppen and writer Yves H. The film transplants the book story/ action from the original French countryside to Britain in the 1990s. And as a debut feature film, The Owners is a well-scoped, with Berg building both characterizing & tension nicely.
The film opens with three young men sitting inside a car creating a hash ‘smoke box’- we have two shell-suited pals- the lairy & chunky ring fingered Nathan(Ian Kenny), and the tubby & more subdued Terry( This is England’s Andrew Ellis). In the back seat is crusty/ punk traveller Gaz(Jake Curran). The three are watching a nearby grand house & discussing robbing it, all of a sudden there is a knock on the window & it’s Mary(Maisie Williams) who it turns out is Nathan’s girlfriend, and he has borrowed her car without asking. She needs to get to work at a local care home, but the three convince her they won’t long then go into the house to break in & steal from the houses safe. After they break-in and trash the place, they find the safe in the basement-but unfortunately, it’s any old fashioned safe & none of them can break into it, so they decide to wait for the owners of the house to return. Fairly soon they return, and we have elderly and portly Doc Richard Higgins( Dr Whos 7th doctor Sylvester McCoy), and his seemingly frail & confused wife Ellen(Rita Tushingham). The robbers, now including Mary, don tight masks- taking the couple down to the basement to try & get the combination out of them one way or another.
As the film unfolds from this point we get some nicely taut interactions, along with some quite effective & brutal effect set-ups. And in due course, we start to get some nice twists & turns in the story, as everyone isn’t who as they first seem. All four of the young cast are very good, and believable as the characters they are playing. McCoy mangers to balance nicely kindly and caring, with a low key creep factor. And Tushingham is good as his very unpredictable & at times clearly unbalanced wife. As a film, The Owners nicely pulls you in with good acting, and rewardingly tensely building unfold, then when the twist & turns happen they are largely competently done- sure there’s nothing we’ve not really seen before, but it’s a well-made and nicely realized thriller with horror touches.
All in all The Owners is certainly one of the better house invasion thrillers I’ve seen in some time, with a good & talented cast, and a rewarding sense of building suspense and tension.