This movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the US TV show of the same name (unless there's been some serious changes to the show since I last checked). So to anyone who's stumbled onto this review by mistake, sorry to disappoint you. Or maybe not - perhaps you'll find something you enjoy here anyway. Although it probably won't be this movie.
Two film students, Isabelle and Will, are making a documentary about the Drayman Estate, a place so dilapidated, crime-ridden, full of feral youth and generally terrible that even the local police consider it a no-go area. Isabelle says that her documentary film is to expose the poverty and social injustice in the estate that has lead to things being as bad as they are, but in reality she's also there at the behest of her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend, who wants Isabelle to find out the location of the estate's marijuana farm, which is said to be especially potent. Unfortunately the estate's residents take exception to this and set about chasing, torturing and killing the outsiders who are now trapped in the estate, leaving Isabelle and Will to try to survive the night there and escape...
Community is a very British film, and I don't mean that in a red telephone box, cups of tea, jolly hockey sticks kind of way. No, it's more like the wet dream of a Daily Mail reader come to life; all feral youths and crime-ridden estates run by drug dealers and deviants. The only thing missing to complete the ultimate Daily Mail fantasy was a refugee family or two. And these youths take the idea of being "feral" to new extremes - they snarl and even indulge in a little group roaring and howling to alert the estate of the intruders, and most of them do very little actual talking. Not to mention how they tend to move - and attack - in packs. The thing is, it's obviously meant to be terrifying, and it's certainly unnerving, but... it's just too much.
There's a fine line between disturbing and absurdity in horror. "Disturbing" is finding yourself trapped somewhere and surrounded by silent, grinning people, all wearing hoodies and staring at you. "Absurdity" is when they start howling like a dog wanting to chase the postman. Community galavants across that line with gay abandon. For every scene that's genuinely unnerving or creepy - such as the children of the estate hunting, torturing and killing (obviously fake) animals, or the matter-of-fact, almost cheery way some of the estate's residents discuss what they do with people they don't have any more use for - there's two scenes that go way over the top or go on for way too long. When you consider that the film is only 78 minutes long, that's not a good use of time or pacing at all.
The film does have one particularly clever framing device. Isabelle and Will are, of course, making a documentary film about the estate, and at the start of the film they conduct a few vox-pop interviews with local, non-estate-dwelling people about what they know about the place. We don't think much of the stories that get told, as they seem like your traditional urban legend fare for the "bad" part of town. Then at the end of the film we see a new pair of students, also doing a documentary on the Drayman Estate (what the hell is on the syllabus of this Film Studies course?), and their filming provides both a coda for the film and also makes one of the stories told about the estate a reality. Or was the footage we see being filmed at the start even Isabelle and Will's to begin with? Regardless, it's an admittedly clever way of doing things that I'll happily give them credit for.
On the whole though, Community squanders a lot of its potential by just going over the top with some things and too long with others. It seems to think it needs to explain things over and over to its audience, which serves to pad the running time more than actually inform us of anything. At the same time it also seems to shy away from showing anything particularly gory or unpleasant, which is unusual for a film which is effectively about the British equivalent of the "psycho hillbillies" trope. By just changing its focus on a couple of things to other aspects of the film, it could have been much more unnerving.
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