Frightfest 2024: ‘Invader’ Review
Stars: Vero Maynez, Colin Huerta, Ruby Vallejo, Joe Swanberg, Jim Sikora | Written and Directed by Mickey Keating
Written and directed by Mickey Keating (Offseason, Carnage Park, Psychopaths), this low budget chiller serves up an interesting take on the home invasion sub-genre. It’s also a textbook example of the slow build, and is arguably more effective in its atmospheric first half than in its more chaotic – and more conventional – denouement.
After a suitably sobering introductory caption, noting that according to the FBI, “a break-in occurs every 30 seconds in the U.S.”, the film first shows us the titular Invader (Joe Swanberg, who also produced) smashing up a property with whatever comes to hand. We then join Ana (Vero Maynez), a young, Spanish-speaking outsider, who arrives in the Chicago suburbs to stay with family, after being dumped off a bus at 4.30am.
After escaping an angry, creepy-looking taxi driver (Jim Sikora), Ana ends up dragging her suitcase to her destination, only to discover that her cousin Camila (Ruby Vallejo) appears to have vanished from the face of the earth. When an encounter with Camila’s furious boss at the local supermarket leads nowhere, she’s befriended by her cousin’s colleague Carlos (Colin Huerta) and together they attempt to break into her home, but they are deeply unprepared for what they find.
Keating’s direction in the first half of the film is impressive, building an increasingly tense sense of mystery and dread, while keeping the focus tightly on Ana, through Dardennes-style close-up camerawork and textured sound design work. Similarly, her limited English language dialogue (Carlos speaks Spanish too) heightens the sense that she is an outsider, which puts an interesting spin on the break-in, as Carlos points out that she’s effectively breaking the law.
Thereafter, the film becomes significantly more generic and defaults to some fairly tedious chasing around a dark house stuff (nobody ever turns a light on in these movies) that feels overly generic. It’s not helped by the decision to stick with the close-up camerawork, which results in a lot of motion-sickness-inducing shakeycam work, which is largely annoying rather than frightening.
That said, the Invader himself is at least interesting (as well as deeply disturbing), and the exact significance of his character is intriguingly open for debate. Does he represent racist white American attitudes (when the police arrive, they automatically assume he is the homeowner), or is there something we can read into the way he systematically trashes every single material object in the house? Either way, the film leaves you with haunting questions and images once all the running and screaming stops.
*** 3/5
Invader screened as part of this year’s Frightfest London.
