After an obligatory pre-credits sequence teaser in which a dysfunctional Romanian mother and daughter are run off a country road and are picked off by an unseen assailant, we meet Clementine (Olivia Bonamy of Chantal Akerman's LA CAPTIVE), a French teacher at a Romanian grade school, and her writer husband Lucas (Michaël Cohen) who live alone in one of those sprawling, decaying mansions in the middle of nowhere. One night, they are woken by strange noises. Their car is stolen. The power is cut. Lights flash through the windows from outside. Dark figures race back and forth in the foreground of the frame behind our weapon-brandishing protagonists who wander the large dark house to search out the sources of various strange noises (the TV, a running tap).

For all the things that go bump in the night, ILS is actually a siege film with some unusually creepy intruders (I'm sure an American remake would be set in the deep South). It as tense as HIGH TENSION without the disappointing, downright insulting ending (though, unfortunately, like HIGH TENSION's writer/director pair, Moreau and Palud have made their inauspicious Hollywood debut with a terrible horror film remake). The film is also an illustrated textbook of stalker horror techniques (and clichés) for the new generation (meaning the addition of a muted, nearly monochrome color palette, rumbling surrounds and LFE, darting foreground and background shapes, shaky hand-held scope photography, etc.).

The film uses its "Inspired by Real Events" tag (which also follows the title onscreen) an an excuse for ambiguity - the DVD cover bears a critic blurb comparing the film to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT - but since the two protagonists are not given much depth (we only viscerally identify with their reactions to the siege situation), this is a film which really demands some more concrete answers plot-wise.