The best thing about “Invader” is that it’s short. But for much of its 69-minute runtime, it is thoroughly unpleasant, which makes it feel much longer.
This quality will be a feature and not a bug for horror fans seeking something lean and mean, with an emphasis on mean. But if you’re not in the headspace for shrieky, shaky-cam torture, this may not be for you. It was not for me.
Writer-director Mickey Keating has crafted a stomach-turning tale of a quiet home disrupted by sadistic cruelty. Longtime indie filmmaker and actor Joe Swanberg pays the titular invader, a vague and nameless source of wanton destruction. A somber title card at the film’s start informs us that, according to the FBI, there’s a break-in every 30 seconds in the United States–guys like this busting in and taking what they want. But “Invader” feels less like a careful cautionary tale and more of a gruesome genre exercise.
There’s promise in the pacing of Keating’s storytelling for a while, though, as he turns his attention to Ana (newcomer Vero Maynez), a young woman who arrives at a bus station in the middle of the night to visit her cousin, Camila. Something is obviously off from the start in this ordinarily peaceful Chicago suburb, and Keating creates a feeling of steady dread. It’s almost post-apocalyptic with its empty streets, abandoned stores, and overgrown parking lots–an eerie vibe he establishes but eventually abandons.
Ana makes phone calls in Spanish (with an inspired use of subtitles), trying to reach anyone she can, to no avail. She’s alone and confused in an unfamiliar place, and we feel her fear. Keating has said that much of the film was improvised, and that approach is most effective in intimate moments when Ana is wandering, a stranger in a strange land. She heads to Camila’s house to connect with Carlo (Colin Huerta), Camila’s co-worker at the grocery store that’s inexplicably open and operating. What she finds there is shocking.
The tone shifts quickly once we realize what Swanberg’s character has done to the place and the people inside it. The quiet, creeping unease of the first half gives way to headache-inducing, hand-held camera work and blaring metal music. If you’re a Type-A neat freak, the massive mess he’s created might be the most disturbing part of all: The kitchen alone is a nightmare. But over and over again, I wondered what Keating’s point was besides simply trying to startle us. This is especially true once Swanberg’s character changes clothes and dons an ensemble theoretically meant to be unsettling; in reality, what he’s wearing is quite silly. And his superhuman ability to survive what should be a deadly attack is just ridiculous.
All of these deficiencies might be forgivable if there were anything to Ana, but there’s not. Maynez has a compelling screen presence, but we have no idea where this young woman came from or who she was before arriving in this bizarro version of suburbia, and her character development consists mainly of making increasingly panicky phone calls and frantically running around the house. How she makes it out–or even whether she does–is meaningless because we have no emotional connection to her. How we make it out, however, is merciful at the movie’s shrug of a conclusion.
