Review of They Look Like People (2016) by Nikolai H — 02 Dec 2016

This was recced to me as an understated, more-creepy-than-frightening psychological thriller-type. It succeeds at that, and I found it creepy, enjoyable, and ultimately oddly... cute?

It moves at a pleasantly slow (but not glacial) pace with some truly effective suspenseful scenes. The concept isn't really new, and what was happening was fairly quickly established by one of the main characters, so there was less guessing at "what's really going on?" than I expected there to be. Once that implication was made, I expected the suspense to evaporate, but it didn't, because it was so effectively portraying the terror felt by the Wyatt and ultimately those around him. It was never really heart-pounding, but it was certainly tense and eerie.

There were some moments of friendship between the two leads that made this feel more personal and like I said, cute. This made the soft ending somewhat more acceptable, but it still felt somewhat disappointing.

I loved some parts of this movie, accepted others as good for character building, and disliked the ending, which brings this to about 3.5 stars in my book - but I'm adding a half star because I think it's better than other ratings indicate.