Film Reviews

Intruders

• Rating:
• Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
• Starring: Clive Owen
• Details: US/UK/Spain / 100mins (15A).

Sometimes you get movies like this, a movie that is gripping up until they try to explain everything and it all falls apart. You're sitting there pleading at the screen, 'Please don't do it… please don't do it, please don't… Oh, you've done it.' It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. Typical of contemporary Spanish horror – stylish visuals/kid in peril - Intruders boasts decent performances and a twist impossible to spot, but…
Juan (Corchero) is a Spanish kid tormented by nightmares of a monster who comes into his room at night. His mother (de Ayala) takes her son's fears seriously and approaches Father Antonio (Daniel Bruhl) for help. Juan can't be making it up because in England young Mia (Purnell) is haunted by the same monster. Dad John (Owen) and mum Susanna (Carice Van Houten – yes, she has a naked scene) are doing everything – even installing a high-tech security system in their house – to stop the intruder getting in but as Mia points out, he's already inside…
28 Weeks Later director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo builds the tension nicely: the scenes are all shadows and creaky floorboards and everything that taps into that childhood fear of being in a room where a monster somewhere lurks. Fresnadillo throws up a few red herrings too, playing around with the idea that it's around Mia's twelfth birthday, the birthday she considers herself to be a young woman (dad's Teddy Bear present is an embarrassment), that strange happenings begin. Like The Exorcist, it looks like it's becoming an allegory for the suppression of female sexualisation – Mia's psychoanalysis takes place in a toy room – but Fresnadillo does away with all that as Intruders comes tumbling down in the last half hour for reasons that's impossible to go into without spoiling it.
Where Fresnadillo excels is the depiction of the monster the kids call Hollowface. Lurking in shadows and never uttering a sound, Fresnadillo obeys classic movie monster traditions and never allows the audience a clean visual, which makes him/it all the more scary. When he does allow us a peek, Intruders loses traction and never recovers.

Review by Gavin Burke