Disposable Labor

Perhaps it is only inevitable (and some might even say appropriate) that, in our current climate of irreconcilable contentiousness on the deeply divided issue of immigration, a movie like ‘Beneath Us’ would emerge as political statement thinly disguised as entertainment.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  In fact, you could say it’s even “trendy” nowadays considering the critical and commercial success of recent South Korean Oscar winner ‘Parasite,’ which brought the contrast of the “Haves” and “Have Nots” into sharp relief.

 

The premise of ‘Beneath Us’ is brutally simple and should be all-too-familiar to those of us who have ever made hardware runs at a Home Depot.  Outside of these hardware stores are gaggles of Latino “Day Laborers,” who would offer to do the heavy-lifting for a pittance compared to what normal by-the-book handymen would charge.  Supposedly entire homes have been built on the backs of these (oftentimes) illegal immigrants.  ‘Beneath Us’ is the nightmarish (as in horror movie) tale of how one such group of immigrants including two brothers were exploited by an evil white house-flipping couple (played by Lynn Collins and James Tupper) and, after their services were rendered, disposed of as nothing more than trash.

 

‘Beneath Us’ could be classified as “torture porn/revenge thriller,” the former due to the sadism of the white couple and the latter because they ultimately got their expected comeuppance.  It’s a run-of-the-mill thriller that offered little new outside of its trappings and not nearly as riveting as the similarly themed 2015 Jonas Cuaron survival thriller, ‘Desierto.’ Nonetheless, it is a serviceable horror thriller in our times.

 

Grade: B-