Invader
Mickey Keating has built up an impressive body of work since Ritual, his 2013 first feature – tackling a range of horror sub-genres with a distinctive, bold style (alienating to some) … Pod, Darling, Carnage Park, Psychopaths, Offseason. Here, with a lean running time of 70 minutes, he goes back to his deconstructing long short or short long Ultra Violence (2011) and taps into something approximating the slasher genre – though the Invader (Joe Swanberg, significantly cast) uses a sledge-hammer, a regular hammer, and whatever other tools which come to hand not merely to kill people but destroy their homes.
After yet another crime statistic opening caption, we meet the Invader in a frenzy as he trashes a kitchen – it doesn’t matter to him whether the red splatter on the walls is blood or canned fruit, he’s just all about the mess. Keating works with cinematographer Mac Fisken and sound designer Shawn Duffy to get close to this maniac and his world – after the dispassionate three-paces-back hand-held camera of In a Violent Nature, this is even more immersive and never even remotely lulling … snatches of radio news about the Richard Speck Chicago killing spree of 1966 are layered in, as if this were echoing around the nameless Invader’s skull, but this is a contemporary story, as signalled by a lot of missed phone connections and blasts of nails-down-your-skull metal music (bands are usually pleased to be asked to appear on movie soundtracks – the acts used here probably won’t like the result) which are the aural equivalent of mindless vandalism.
Most of the film is from the viewpoint of Ana (Vero Maynez), a Spanish-speaking non-American (Mexican?) who arrives in Chicago on a bus at four in the morning and is turfed out into an unpeopled wilderness. A taxi driver (Jim Sikora) looks as if he’s auditioning to be the next franchise slasher fiend (half his face covered in bloody bandages) and Ana quite properly doesn’t get in his cab, whereupon he becomes a rage-fuelled loon. The relatives she has come to stay with don’t respond to any messages or calls, and Ana winds up walking eight kilometers – dragging her case and backpack – through an early morning interzone of run-down neighbourhoods … only to find when she gets to the neat detached family home that no one answers the door. She goes to her cousin’s workplace – a local market – and gets shouted at by a boss angry the girl hasn’t turned up for her shift but makes an ally in a co-worker (Colin Huerta) who takes the disappearance seriously … especially after Ana has found the family car abandoned, stripped of numberplates, and in a mess (including a bloodied screwdriver).
Plainly, an encounter with the Invader is on the cards … and calling the cops doesn’t help since they instinctively assume a polite anglo who answers the door (‘that’s not my uncle’) is a homeowner and let him be. It’s a minimalist narrative, and in many ways the first half – which is about the universal experience of a pre-planned foreign trip which doesn’t work out and leads to a lot of needless hassle – is as vivid, disorienting and disturbing as the slightly more conventional girl vs killer material which is the meat of the movie. Keating’s camera gets close to Maynez’ face, and the actor conveys a lot as a character who has to hold things back as a protective measure – Ana is as wary and interior as the Invader (who eventually gets into a bizarre outfit which evokes some 1970s psycho/pervo pics) is uncontrolled and out there. Most of the violence is done to things rather than people, but this is a rare home invasion film to consider the real violation of the crime – the aftermath of the Invader’s assault on a home looks as if the wildest, least fun party ever has been thrown in a house, with every surface covered, every item of furniture ruined, every utility trashed, every personalising memento and shared comfort smashed to bits.
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