J Paul Johnson
Invader, having released theatrically last month and debuting on digital this week, opens with a brief, stark white-on-black text precis: “According to the FBI, a break-in occurs every thirty seconds in the United States.” That is, as it turns out, the depth of this slim genre exercise’s thematic complexity. While its second half at least manages a technical competence in standard horror-film trope-making—before, that is, its Oops! We’ve-run-out-of-money conclusion—Invader is at best paint-by-numbers filmmaking, following a simple, shopworn recipe without any of the kinds of imagination or inspiration its genre has seen in the past decade.
Those fans deeply enamored of the genre might well forgive a film like Invader its faults. For instance, does it matter that its protagonist, a young woman named Ana (Vero Maynez) traveling to visit her cousin Camila in the Chicago suburbs, has—despite being onscreen, mostly alone, for 40 of the film’s first 70 minutes—has not a single discernible character trait? Other than the rote fact of her visit, Ana has no personality traits, no quirks, no desires, no anxieties, no motivations—nothing of the sort that might help audiences care about her or her survival. Not that a horror heroine need be plucky or resourceful, but she need be something. Maynez has some screen presence, but she can’t rescue a role that simply hasn’t been written. It does not help that the entirety of the film’s first half is shot in a close-up wobbly-cam that shakes with an epileptic fervor so constant one wonders if it its intent is parodic.
When Ana’s bus is delayed and she can’t get ahold of her cousin, she ventures miles on foot to Camila’s house, set forebodingly alone on a neighborless plat. Beside her is the equally trait-lacking (except that he is something of a doofus) Carlo (Colin Huerta), one of Camila’s co-workers. Once they reach the house and discover the horrors within, Invader‘s single-camera shake-and-wobble cinematography works a little better and the film’s dawdling pace picks up. There, Camila’s house is the site of an evil that for anyone who values good housekeeping will be difficult to stomach, and Ana in particular must act to save her cousin, her new friend, and herself from a merciless killer.
While as a home-invasion genre exercise Invader is on more solid ground inside the grisly, ghastly confines of Camila’s house, it seems to lose its footing again just minutes later once outside them. The killer, whose odd getup and distinctive musical preferences give him more character definition than the film’s protagonist, somehow survives losing at least a liter of blood to bound about the suburban alleyways and rooftops like a Spider-Man or Daredevil in his prime. (Fortunately for him, one of the neighbors conveniently keeps a healthy roll of duct tape in their bathroom—do you?—to serve as a much-needed tourniquet.) Not to spoil the film’s ending, but when Invader loses interest in its own protagonist’s fate with whom it spent the first 55 of its 70 minutes, the conclusion feels more like a consequence of an exhaustion of scant resources than a satisfying narrative denouement.
Writer-director Mickey Keating and producer Joe Swanberg (who also plays the uncredited, nameless Invader of the film’s title) are working here with a skeleton crew and a guerilla approach to production that involves no small amount of improvisation—even, they say, without a script or a shot list. That’s a choice that can pay off when the original conception and crew’s talents are commensurate with the thoughtfulness of the approach. Here, though, the consequence feels more tossed-off than anything. Thematically, there is at most an inchoate thread of Trumpist white-male rage informing the invasion. Aesthetically, the film’s shaky-cam incessance is more of an annoyance than a conceit: even a wholly static long take exterior shot of Camila’s house has to wobble and spasm like a Midwest earthquake.
Her character may disappear from the narrative, but Maynez the lead actor emerges largely unscathed from Invader. Despite her role being woefully underwritten, Maynez exudes a presence onscreen that suggests she may be capable of far more than the frightened ad hoc reaction shots Invader‘s slim script allows her. Otherwise, except for fans of the home-invasion subgenre so ardent they will watch anything at all, Invader offers nothing new and struggles mightily even to master the most mundane of its generic set of tropes.
