60
The Ones Below is a creepy genre exercise by a craftsman finding his groove.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
Screen International by Allan Hunter
The economical, precisely calibrated screenplay is nicely filled with enough simmering conflicts, character flaws and guilty resentments to keep you intrigued by what lies beneath the surface of these comfortable, middle-class lives
63
Even the film's lapses inform it with a free-associative sense of portent, evoking the stupid things we inexplicably do in our most personal nightmares.
80
Time Out London by Dave Calhoun
As a storyteller, Farr is bold enough to keep us guessing until the film’s final moments, but a late need to explain lets the film down a little.
50
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
The Ones Below needs some B-movie embellishment to set it apart from every other wannabe thriller, but it hopes it’s too serious for such things. So exacting and severe, we see the strings and grow bored of their inevitability.
58
Although Farr layers on the creepy until the last frame of The Ones Below, the film's ultimate reveal is hardly shocking, and that the film spends a gratuitous amount time unspooling it long after it's clear what has gone down feels indulgent and unearned.
50
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
The Ones Below is a thriller that exasperates more than it thrills.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Ones Below is an intimately disturbing nightmare of the upper middle classes, with tinges of melodrama and staginess, entirely appropriate for its air of suppressed psychosis.
50
Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
For all its limited ambitions, The Ones Below serves its purpose as a solid calling card for Farr's filmmaking future, a gripping exercise in domestic suspense that sets out its stall on the shoulders of giants.