Less scary than silly, Deon Taylor’s The Intruder at least boasts a promising enough premise: An upwardly mobile young couple from the city, Annie (Meagan Good) and Scott (Michael Ealy), buys a gorgeously rustic estate in Napa Valley only to find that the owner, Charlie (Dennis Quaid), is unwilling to let the home go. The film makes a game attempt at tapping into fears people have of owning—or renting—a place that can be taken away from them at any moment. Unfortunately, Taylor has no feel for his bucolic setting, and his stabs at suspense are half-hearted and derivative, shamelessly ripping off Horror 101 thrills like the Psycho shower sequence and the axe-to-the-door scene from The Shining.
The Intruder is ostensibly about the war for the soul of a house, but it couldn’t feel less lived in. The central home looks like the sort of well-appointed but essentially anonymous place you might rent on Airbnb. David Loughery’s script attempts to locate a theme of male anxiety in the macho rivalry between Scott and Charlie, which gradually morphs from a battle over their domain into a contest for Annie’s affections. But the film doesn’t know what to do with these relationships, and the impact of Charlie’s intrusion into Scott and Annie’s marriage is muted by the fact that he never seems like a remotely credible romantic partner for Annie.
That’s largely thanks to Quaid’s peculiar performance, which certainly doesn’t scream sex appeal, or stokes our terror. One admires the filmmakers’ boldness in casting the all-American good ol’ boy so thoroughly against type, but Quaid never finds the proper wavelength for his performance, contorting his face into one weird grimace after another and delivering his lines with a strangulated discombobulation that telegraphs Charlie’s unhingedness from the very first moment he’s on screen. Quaid’s oddball turn—equal parts Clint Eastwood and Norman Bates, though not as interesting as that might sound—mostly works on the level of comedy, drawing laughs out of Charlie’s social awkwardness and démodé concept of manliness.
Perhaps the most tantalizing aspect of The Intruder is also the one the filmmakers do the least with: its racial subtext. There’s an undeniable subversive kick to the idea of a black family moving from San Francisco to a rural, predominantly white town and being treated as interlopers by the very person who sold them their new home. And yet, unfortunately, Taylor and Loughery are content to just leave this racial tension hanging there, never developing it nor even really acknowledging it. It’s just one of the many squandered opportunities in a film that opts for the easiest, cheapest, and least creative choice at every possible turn.
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