Intruders: Using Fear to Create Something Far Less Scary
“Anna suffers from agoraphobia so crippling that when a trio of criminals break into her house, she cannot bring herself to flee.”
This is the tagline for the Dark Sky home video release of the recent film Intruders and it teases a scenario of what might happen when a person suffering from a phobia is confronted with something life-threatening. Unfortunately, this isn’t what Intruders is about. What could have been an examination of what it’s like to deal with overwhelming, uncontrollable fear becomes something entirely different and far less thought-provoking.
Intruders tosses out little hints that seem like non sequiturs at first and it’s clear that something is amiss. Anna is caring for her terminally ill brother at home. We aren’t told of her phobia at first, but we do wonder why she doesn’t leave the house. She gets angry when her brother Conrad calls her by the nickname “Birdy” and even more upset when he tells her she needs to forgive their late father for something he did in the past.
The siblings live in a huge, old house that is in a state of disrepair and neglect, but Anna cannot only afford in-home medical equipment and meal delivery, she also offers a giant bag of cash to the delivery person Dan, whom she clearly considers her only friend. Why would someone with so much money live this way? And where exactly did this money come from?
Soon the promised trio of criminals shows up looking for the money and even before we learn that it was Dan who tipped them off, we’ve figured it out. When they ponder why Anna doesn’t leave, the secret of her agoraphobia is revealed in a clichéd scene that is clearly supposed to be from her perspective: out of focus and distorted.
That’s not the real secret of Intruders, however, as the second half of the tagline states: “But what the intruders don’t realize is that agoraphobia is not her only psychosis.” Unfortunately, this psychosis turns out to be convoluted yet predictable, explained through painfully awkward exposition that feels like an uninspired, late-series episode of Law & Order: SVU. It’s the worst kind of twist: one that doesn’t make us reconsider everything we’ve seen before but which actually reveals the movie to be just a by-the-numbers thriller that uses victimization as an attempt at character development.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be such an egregious misstep if we cared about Anna, but we don’t. Her mannerisms are so obvious that we don’t actually believe in her as a character. The other cast members don’t fare much better, with the exception of Martin Starr as Perry. He’s the most sympathetic character and (spoiler alert!) he kills a bird during the course of the film.
Intruders was originally titled Shut In, which seems like not only a better title, but a better movie overall. I can’t help but feel cheated that a mental health issue was used as a device to entice viewers into watching a movie about a totally different kind of pathology. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, Intruders isn’t even a good enough film to get past that major hurdle.