You will have heard me, at least a couple times, espouse my love of maximalism. When there’s too much dessert and they somehow still offer it a la mode. In film, at least, the ‘more is more’ approach is almost always going to hit with me. Mickey Keating’s newest, Invader, isn’t operating in that realm. But Skinamarink, this ain’t either. At just barely over an hour in length, Invader makes the most of every moment, every beat both explicit and implied, to craft a home invasion thriller as darkly memorable as it is terrifying.
A title card that tells us that, according to the FBI, there’s a break-in every 30 seconds in America gives way to one such event. A man (Joe Swanburg) makes his way around a quiet, seemingly empty house like he owns the place, even though he clearly doesn’t. Switching perspectives, we see Ana (Vero Maynez) as she arrives by bus from Mexico to her cousin Camila’s American small town for a visit. Unable to reach Camila by phone, Ana tries to visit her home but can’t find her there. She roams around town, eventually meeting Carlo (Colin Huerta) at the grocery store where he and Camila work, and the pair continue the search. Little do they know that they’ll have to face down a nameless, ruthless incursion from the almost Michael Myers-shaped, BTK Killer-coded threat that’s waiting for them.
What makes Invader scary, at least to me, is the lack of explanation. It’s not a film that dwells on the ‘why’ of what is happening, and that puts you squarely in Ana’s headspace. She’s in a foreign country and the locals are anything but welcoming, and she is lost trying and failing to make contact with her missing cousin. And the motives surrounding Swanburg’s anonymous monster remain entirely shrouded in the same mystery even as the credits roll on Invader. That disorientation fuels the fear behind an already-terrifying situation and Keating shoots the film in almost-useless close-up in the shakiest of shaky cam. This means you’re constantly straining to parse what you’re seeing, both from the jarring camerawork and the incongruity of the content itself. And yes, it occurs to me that what I’ve just described could only be read as complimentary of a particular type of horror movie. Invader is precisely that type of horror movie.
The calculated brevity and lean-ness of Invader is a fairly radical departure from Keating’s previous films like 2015’s POD and Darling, and 2021’s Offseason. There is nothing supernatural afoot here and certainly no aliens. Instead, this is a grounded, realistic work that feels so authentic both in style and story that it cuts to the bone. In the intervening years between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and today, there have been many attempts and far fewer successes in horrors that capture that film’s gritty authenticity. Invader hits the mark for me, and keeping so many of the details of the Invader vague, it allows him to be a blank slate on which to project one’s worst fears and anxieties, no matter what they are.
With performances that are, according to Keating, largely improvised, Invader feels as though you’re watching something you shouldn’t, and that’s a vibe I adore when a filmmaker cultivates and executes it with the skill that’s going on here. It gets to the root of what I love in horror, and Keating knows precisely how to wield it. The feeling of observing something this horrific is viscerally chilling, and it amplifies and builds – spoiler alert – without providing a satisfying conclusion. Keating himself says that he’s “more interested and excited by situations than overall stories” and he definitely gets the vibe right here. While there’s obviously a place for stories in any film, it’s fascinating and particularly effective to see the traditional story structure be eschewed for spooky vibes. That’s horror to me, and even if the production is spartan, it cultivates a maximalist amount of fear.
Mickey Keating’s Invader is currently in limited theatrical release from Music Box Films and Doppelganger Releasing.
