‘Invader’ Movie Review: Horror Indie Unsettles, Devolves Into Unpleasantness With Little To Say
Photo from Music Box Films
From Jeremy Kibler
Home-invasion movies are a dime a dozen, but Mickey Keating’s Invader is not like most. That would make it seem like this nasty piece of work has originality on its side or something zeitgeisty on its mind, however, it’s not worth anyone’s trouble to find out. The film clocks in at just over an hour, and that still seems too long. If Keating’s only intention was to shock, Invader is effectively invasive in that regard, but it eventually becomes too much of an unpleasant sit.
The setup to Invader is unsettling, even after a title card about how, according to the FBI, there is a break-in every 30 seconds in the United States. Ana (Vero Maynez) takes a bus to the Chicago suburbs to visit her cousin Camila (Ruby Vallejo). Even after a cab driver freaks her out, she gets even more worried when she can’t locate Camila. She finds her cousin’s car abandoned in the lot outside her work. Once Ana gets to Camila’s house, she has good reason to suspect the worst.
he film is clearly set in the present day in Trump’s America where Spanish-speaking people feel “othered.” Director Keating certainly creates a fair amount of dread as we follow Ana trying to find her cousin. Ana is all by herself and understandably cautious in what is a foreign place to her, and that feeling is palpable. As Ana, Vero Maynez gets to be terrified, but she still finds resolve and uses available resources to come out on top. Indie filmmaker and actor Joe Swanberg is uncredited but plays the titular invader, a man who gets off on destruction. Once we realize what this man is capable of, the level of menace, however, doesn’t get ratcheted up; Swanberg ends up running around in a certain outfit and it’s just ridiculous.
The filmmaking is spare but still not always restrained. Mac Fisken’s cinematography is entirely handheld and in constant motion; this choice can certainly be effective at first, shooting our protagonist with a level of jittery anxiety, until it’s borderline-unwatchable. Then there’s James Schafer’s score, which is foreboding but also so insistent and eventually just noisy. It’s choices like both the vérité-style aesthetic and the nails-on-a-chalkboard soundscape that bring one to the conclusion that Keating just wants us to be uncomfortable, but to what end?
There is some sufficient tension in waiting for something to pounce, but once the film becomes such a forgone conclusion, it’s hard to remain invested. What, if anything, Keating wants to say here is also unclear, not that clean-cut messaging is the end-all, be-all. Small-town America is like a prison where citizens believe they can just destroy what isn’t theirs? Your guess is as good as mine.
Invader has early promise of being a taut indie experiment, until that all goes down the tubes. Then all we’re stuck with is an exploitative, tedious exercise and nothing more.
Rating: 1.5/5
Invader is currently in select theaters.
