Invader (2024) Review

Ana (Vero Maynez) arrives in Chicago, having travelled there to visit her cousin Camila (Ruby Vallejo). The journey has not exactly gone according to plan and Ana finds herself in an unnervingly empty coach station at four thirty in the morning. Ana calls Camila to see if someone can come and pick her up but there’s no answer so she sets off on foot to her uncle’s, already worried about what may have happened there…

Mickey Keating’s brisk, barbed blast of true crime-inflected nastiness opens with a quote that a break-in occurs every thirty seconds in the US and then cuts to a perp (Joe Swanberg, who is also one of the producers) in the midst of trashing the latest place he’s unlawfully made his own. A sledgehammer is taken to walls, a sofa is slashed, tinned food is liberally splattered around, all shot with a trembly, handheld, close quarters view of the unhinged mayhem.

It’s inevitable that the paths of Ana and the intruder will cross but the first act stalls that confrontation to focus on how the title can easily be applied to Ana by those in a supposedly welcoming environment, her Hispanic heritage viewed with suspicion by the manager of the local supermarket where Camila works. Any other forms of assistance, law enforcement included, appear next to non-existent except for Camila’s friendly colleague Carlos (Colin Huerta) who offers to drive Ana to her uncle’s place. Carlos has skin in the game and is smart enough to know that both he and Ana are often assumed to have wrongdoing on their minds.

Arriving at a locked dwelling with no sign of the inhabitants, Ana and Carlos soon realise something is wrong and, although Carlos is wary of them taking part in any kind of forced entry because of its potential criminality, the duo gain access to the interior and find themselves in a nightmare scenario as the housebreaker suddenly returns and a deadly game of cat and mouse commences, the tight framing amplifying the increasing sense of fear.

Invader is a seventy-minute volley of nerve-shredding scuzz, sliding from the expansive terrors of being alone in a seemingly uninhabited sprawl of city backstreets through the muted surroundings of sparsely populated woodland and settling into the claustrophobic dread generated by the dark corners and limited eyelines of a home. The villain of the piece is purposely assigned no motive as to why he’s on his destructive spree and it’s the lack of explanation which increases the viewer’s perception of the danger in which Ana and Carlos find themselves.

As the story heads into the last act, there’s a revelation about the antagonist which immediately seems as if the proceedings are going to fall back on a lazy trope regarding big screen psychopaths but no, Invader presents this as merely a hitherto unforeseen kink of the killer, complete with accompanying burst of death metal on the soundtrack. It’s a darkly humorous diversion but also a deeply terrifying one as it demonstrates the killer’s utter disregard for anything other than his next source of deranged amusement.

Those who enjoyed the slow burn, classy spookiness of Keating’s previous work Offseason may be thrown by his swerve into the lo-fi, psychological audience torture he’s opted for here. The jittery camerawork and disconcerting sound design work to create an atmosphere of constant unease for the onlooker, as does Swanberg’s alarming turn and the brutality is all the more effective for having some of the most excessive violence presented in its aftermath or taking place just out of shot.

With its spare plot, a raw, documentary-like quality to its visual style and a decidedly chaotic final twenty minutes which eventually ditches the standard horror showdown in favour of literally heading in another direction, Invader has the power to bewilder and frustrate to the very last frame. And that’s one of the things I really enjoyed about it. It won’t convert Keating’s naysayers to his work but it’s a grubby, unpolished, unfiltered little trouble causer with an authentic central performance from Maynez and a distressing air that stayed with me on the walk back to my hotel from the cinema. I didn’t go so far as to peek around the corners of the room for unwanted guests but, at least for a while, I wasn’t in a happy place. That has to be a recommendation.

Movie Rating:

Invader trailer