THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE
 

what do you get when you mix: hipsters, bromance, paranoia, and mumblecore sensibilities? You get THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE.

Two 20-something old friends are reunited (in a very empty neighborhood in Brooklyn). But one has a very dark secret. Throw in a traditional cute pixie chick and some sulfuric acid and the secret might turn deadly.

I enjoyed this even with its ultra-low budget & nonexistent effects. The buddies at the center are engaging (even when annoying) and it did keep me guessing.

Streaming on Netflix - so worth the price!

Sounds up my alley. I'll check it out!

Some of those qualities makes me think of fellow Netflix hipflick 'John Dies at the End'. You ever catch that one?

@sculpt - I loved John Dies - this is a bit less fantastic but has a similar vibe (at a very low budget level).

@DeadBeat - I like you too! I'll check those out. I tend to try to watch a film on my iPad while I'm at the gym. So Netflix has been good for me to catch and indie/foreign horror films tend to be a bit shorter (I'm not doing 130minutes on a treadmill for god's sakes! I'm just a simple monkey - what do they expect from me!!)

Last Shift has been in my queue for awhile.

I may have to give it another shot. Didn't care for it the first time I watched it. Turned it off after about 30 minutes.

I liked that one too. The friendship felt genuine and it had a really good creepy atmosphere

Once I realized it was not going to be regular horror film - I really enjoyed it.

Similar to TRASH FIRE, which I liked in part because it was so disjointed and each act of the film felt totally different while still following the same story and characters.

Shit. That movie was absolutely fantastic. What really struck me about it was


[Spoilers]



We're essentially dealing with an unreliable narrator - Someone who either IS crazy, or is NOT. As someone that has dealt with being "crazy" (I was undiagnosed bipolar until my mid-20's), it can be really challenging navigating friendships. Me, personally, I found that people LOVED ME when I was in my manic periods... Not so much when I was in my downward slope. It was so hard and I started to mistrust that people actually cared about me - I have a hard time with the ways that movies represent the mentally ill because they are typically very black and white - They're crazy or not. Period.

What I absolutely loved about this movie is that at its heart, it's about a guy who is legitimately trying to help his friend who is mentally ill, at the harrowing cost of that scene in the end when he was demonstrating that he isn't one of those "Things." He struggles with supporting/helping his friend, but unlike other movies, when he starts to suspect that his friend is unwell, he doesn't TURN on his friend. I've seen that so many times. Turn on the friend, the friend lashes out, goes all crazy, and then winds up fucking DEAD. No. Instead he believes him, and grounds him. I don't think I've ever seen that happen in a psychological thriller like that - Either the Guy is Crazy (and turns into an actual threat) or the Guy is NOT Crazy (and enter whatever Hell-dimension he has been seeing and we're all truly fucked). This movie honestly choked me up a bit because it was literally about a guy just BEING THERE and PROVIDING SUPPORT for someone with a mental illness. Sometimes, that's literally all you can do - Just say "I'm here, I care about you, you're important."


[/SPOILERS]

The way they did the friendship was really the best part of the movie

Nice movie. Thanks for this topic! :)

misconception
 

When I read the name of the thread, "They look like people", I figured it would be something along the lines of They Live. I can't think of movies about doppelgangers (evil duplicates of specific people), without thinking of that Stephen Wright joke: "I woke up this morning and discovered that everything in my apartment had been stolen, and replaced by an exact duplicate."

A kind of story that really scares my friend Don is one where your identity is threatened, like the twilight zone episode where a guy wakes up next to a woman who claims to be his wife, and all the people insist he is somebody he isn't. Then there's the plot where a guy goes to his regular place of employment and nobody recognizes him.

Then there's the movies where a guy wakes up from a nightmare, and finds out that he is still in the nightmare, like Seizure.

One of my favorite episodes of The Prisoner (the original) is the one where Number Two tries to convince Number Six that he is not the real Number Six. Gee, this is getting kind of like Total Recall.

So what did you think of "They look like people"?


This was my review: