Us and Them

A rat flails about in a vat of water. It claws at the edges, cries out for help, and even­tu­al­ly accepts its fate. Jack Roth’s Dan­ny – a young, gaunt and work­ing class anar­chist – argues that our cur­rent socio-eco­nom­ic cli­mate will meet the same gris­ly end. His solu­tion? Wield a plas­tic gun with enough rage-fuelled con­vic­tion to make it seem real, take a wealthy fam­i­ly hostage, and ask them to gam­ble on their lives.

Watch­ing his scheme play out is like ogling at an auteur pick ​’n’ mix. There’s the ground­ed vio­lence of Ben Wheat­ley, the play­ful ban­ter of Guy Ritchie and Spike Lee pops up to egg on our char­ac­ters as they spew class-cen­tric insults at the cam­era. Kubrick, too: with a sound­track heavy on the clas­si­cal and bran­dish­ing a dis­con­tent­ed youth at its epi­cen­tre, Us and Them is essen­tial­ly A Clock­work Orange repur­posed for the post-Brex­it era.

It shouldn’t work – Mar­tin has thrown every­thing and the kitchen sink dra­ma at his film, but Us and Them is styl­ish, how­ev­er heav­i­ly bor­rowed that style is, and the script’s hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­tracts enough from the fact that its mus­ings on class con­flict are under­de­vel­oped at best.

Begin­ning on the day of the crime and flit­ting through a glut of flash­backs, the film’s struc­ture is as tight­ly woven as it is des­per­ate­ly errat­ic. With his char­ac­ters oper­at­ing sole­ly in the con­fined spaces of a lav­ish man­sion, you can sense Mar­tin doing every­thing in his pow­er to avoid an inher­ent stagi­ness. And so we have tongue-in-cheek title cards that blare out on screen when­ev­er they please, and cam­era swivels dizzy­ing enough to induce nausea.

Us and Them offers up an unde­ni­ably fran­tic, nut­ty 90 min­utes, but Martin’s insight towards our socio-eco­nom­ic divide is lost amid the rack­et. Per­haps that rat just want­ed to drown out the noise.