Intruders

★★

(2012)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s third horror film in 10 years sadly veers further away from his interesting, promising and cool debut Intacto than the mainstream, stylish but ultimately hollow 28 Weeks Later did. Intruders runs two parallel horror fairy tales side by side, creating a creature who lives in the mind, in the bedrooms and on the pages of children’s bed time stories. There are various, sometimes painful references to classic horror and the whole thing sadly culminates in a rather clumsy and obvious finale.

Clive Owen plays John Farrow, putting on his best concerned daddy face in London for his terrified young daughter Mia (Carice Van Houton) who is convinced that a faceless creature is living in her closet, while Juan (Izan Corchero) and his mother (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) in Spain fight off a similarly nightmarish figure with the help of Daniel Bruhl’s weirdly obvious impersonation of Jason Miller’s hunched and vulnerable Father Karras from The Exorcist. Half arsed questions of faith, imagination and missing fathers don’t really yield any reward and the film slowly loses its way.

Suffering from a massive drops in tension because of the frequent country hopping and not really using any of the great tools at his disposal, Fresnadillo sadly has made two stories which are far too similar to each other to be used to one another’s advantage. The cast do well in some nice horror set pieces and do what they can with the uneven and un-scary script but ultimately Intruders is a bit of a dead fish.