With Beneath Us, the genius lie entirely in the pun of the title. First-time feature director Max Pachman’s slice of immigrationsploitation leaves subtlety out of the picture, despite the resonance and seriousness of its premise.
Four undocumented workers — including brothers Alejandro and Memo — are hired by the über-wealthy, über-voluptuous Mrs. Rhodes (Lynn Collins, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to finish construction on a guest home at a bargain-basement price. The property she shares with her husband (James Tupper, 2017’s Totem) is well-fortified, cut off from the rest of the world and all its promise with an electric fence. Forced to work day and night with no rest until the job is done, the workers too slowly realize they’re not going to be allowed to leave alive, what with the underground cavern of hired hands past.
To call the bosses are “racist” is to undersell their cruelty, which is hardly a one-off; Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes are essentially serial killers with the highest credit limit possible on a Home Depot credit card. The longer the job takes, the crazier Mrs. Rhodes gets, which is both the film’s greatest asset and liability. From the first scene, Pachman takes care to set up the troubled family dynamics of Alejandro (Rigo Sanchez, TV’s Animal Kingdom) and Memo (Josue Aguirre, Incarnate), then play them out … until he allows Tupper and especially Collins to approach their parts from rail No. 3.
Make no mistake: Collins is enormous fun in an utterly unhinged performance, but her Karen-to-the-nth-degree antics distract from the movie’s message even more than her push-up bra. It’s difficult to make politics stick in horror when your antagonist vamps and tramps her way through what amounts to a Tex-Mex Avery cartoon. —Rod Lott