Unwelcome visits

The Intruder

Starring: Michael Ealy, Meagan Good, Dennis Quaid

Director: Deon Taylor

Genre: Horror

Rating: PG15

RUNTIME: 112 Mins

 An important cautionary tale about the dangers of buying homes whose owners aren’t ready to part with them, Deon Taylor’s The Intruder should definitely be seen by those looking to get on the property market for the first time.

Whether anybody else should see it is a question of the viewer’s enthusiasm for domestic stalker flicks. Essentially, it’s a cookie-cutter thriller that takes its time getting to the good stuff.

Michael Ealy and Meagan Good play Scott and Annie Howard. He’s ‘the number-one earner’ at a San Francisco marketing firm and she writes the occasional magazine article and daydreams about a home far from the city where they can raise kids.

They find a gorgeous property whose owner, an empty-nest widower named Charlie (Dennis Quaid), clearly has put his soul into every strip of caulk and musty bit of decor. The estate is called Foxglove, and when Annie asks: “Foxglove is poisonous, isn’t it?” Charlie cheerfully replies: “Highly.”

That evidently seals the deal, as our heroes are soon at the place with a crew of movers. But days after they’ve christened their new home, Charlie is still dropping by unannounced at inconvenient moments. He gets the riding lawnmower out of the garage when he thinks the grass is too high; he brings potting soil when local deer have gone on a garden-munching rampage. Wasn’t this guy supposed to have moved to Florida?

The couple’s responses hew closely to gender stereotypes: Scott wants nobody trespassing on his new property; Annie is sad for the lonely guy. But there’s a wide gulf between sympathy for one’s elders and dangerous naiveté. Long after Scott has (correctly) guessed Charlie’s spying on them and made Annie promise she won’t tolerate his intrusions, Annie’s still inviting him into their home when Scott’s off at work. Whether he started off with this in mind or not, Charlie soon develops some unhealthy expectations about where things might lead with this beautiful married woman who could be his daughter.

David Loughery’s flat script makes Annie and Scott a wholly generic pair of protagonists whose friends are even duller. Director Taylor does not seem made for tension-building drama as the first two acts offer a few lukewarm jump-reveals, in which we briefly glimpse Charlie in places he’s not supposed to be, but little more.

Lacking much really menacing dialogue, Quaid tries to pick up the slack with his features. His cheeks become mask-like when he contorts that familiar grin into a caricature of goodwill. It sometimes looks as if Charlie’s pain were not emotional but physical, but people here don’t seem to recognise the difference between a grimace and a smile.

Silent stalking does eventually give way to action, with a nice twist that would be more satisfying if Taylor hadn’t telegraphed it in so many shots. Quaid occasionally resembles a Z-grade horror villain, but the film isn’t ready to launch him into over-the-top trashy glory. Taylor gets a couple of cheap crowd reactions when he has Quaid chop through a door like Jack Nicholson or lick Good’s torso while Annie’s unconscious. But these lurid moments arrive too late to make The Intruder feel like it belongs in a genre where so many former residents have made themselves at home.

Now showing in all Bahrain’s cinemas.

 Kristian’s verdict: 2/5