INVADER - Mark Reviews Movies

Invader, Doppelgänger Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

The likely subtext of Invader suggests a subversive take on a go-to thriller conceit. Writer/director Mickey Keating's movie is about, as the title tells us, a home invasion, and there's clearly something to the point that the homeowners and a relative trying to figure out what has happened to her family members are of a Hispanic background. Meanwhile, the eponymous invader, played by an uncredited Joe Swanberg, is a plain, anonymous white guy who violently takes over the house.

There are some similarly loaded moments throughout the movie (Note, for example, which U.S. President is on a TV in the backdrop of one scene and the context of when he's talking), but the entire thing, really, is loaded with a pretty clear political idea. If only the movie trusted that more to actually make it part of the actual text of the story, Keating might have been on to something.

Instead, the filmmaker teases us with those ideas, while also delaying and evading the actual thriller elements of his movie. It's one thing for a filmmaker to hold back on what really is meant to be said within a movie. It's entirely another thing for a movie to hold back on the sole purpose of its existence.

The story here opens with that invader breaking into an apartment and proceeding to break everything he can within that space. This guy isn't motivated by money or stealing anything of value within this home. No, he's focused entirely on destruction—closing a door, for example, just so he can slam his body into it and dislodge it from its hinges. He's sending a message, although what that might be for his victims is left something of a mystery. Based on the stuff we can gather from the later crime, it might simply be one of violently taking control over something he believes to be his or stating in no uncertain terms that he doesn't see these people as welcome in this place.

Really, though, the invader becomes nothing more than a creepily anonymous and violently determined villain. We never learn his name or anything else about him, and his voice is only heard in ferocious screams or some put-upon naïveté near the end of the movie. If he's meant to represent what seems to be obvious from some specific details of the plot and other characters, Keating refuses to put that up front or, for that matter, even to confirm it by way of his actions, which are as broad and predictable as the story itself.

After that prologue, most of the movie follows Ana (Vero Maynez), who has come to the suburbs of Chicago to visit her uncle, aunt, and cousin at their home. A bunch of things go wrong, including the bus hitting traffic, the local trains not running when she arrives late, and a drawn-out encounter with a persistent and possibly sinister cab driver that goes nowhere. Soon enough, Ana, who can't get a hold of any of her nearby relatives, has to walk several miles (which Keating shows in mostly uneventful detail), only to discover that no one at the house is answering her knocks either.

The screenplays heads in more roundabout directions, sending Ana to her cousin's job at a local grocery store, having her find the cousin's car abandoned in a parking lot (with evidence of some bloody encounter, which Ana is only briefly concerned by), and giving her an ally in the cousin's co-worker Carlo (Colin Huerta). She suggests they should report all of this to the police, but with yet another bit of loaded evasion, Carlo says that would be a bad idea. If we're supposed to infer that Ana's family is made up of undocumented immigrants, wouldn't it be even more pointed if Keating could just say it outright?

Instead, we're left to wonder if the filmmaker is even making the point he seems to be making. Invader also leaves us waiting and waiting and waiting some more for the inevitable bit when Ana and Carlo finally make it inside the house, have to hide from the invader, and are forced into a string of confrontations with him. That sequence is fine enough, perhaps, as staged inside the claustrophobic chaos of the house and with Swanberg's villain now proven to be a legitimate threat to more than personal property and material possessions. The movie's mostly an oddity—a thriller that might have something deeper to say but that avoids saying it or, for that matter, being much of a thriller.

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