Intruders (2011)

Intruders arrives from 2011, a year when a supernatural horror film could still concern itself solely with a faceless bogeyman and the parents who fail to protect their children. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo splits his narrative between London and Madrid, giving us two households menaced by the same entity, Hollow Face, a creature who covets the faces of the young. Clive Owen broods handsomely as the father in England. Pilar Lopez de Ayala does the equivalent work in Spain. Daniel Bruhl appears as a priest, offering counsel to the Spanish family and little else. Critics at the time found the first act promising and the remainder thin, and the box office agreed, with a worldwide gross that barely registered.

An audit of the film's cultural conscience returns very little. The cast is European and white, with Lolita Chakrabarti appearing briefly as Dr. Roy, a presence that carries no identity commentary and seeks none. The mothers in the story are mothers, not symbols. The children are children, not case studies. There is no gender politics, no racial reckoning, no environmental lament, no class grievance, no meditation on body or mind. The monster wants faces. That is the entire thesis. It is a film about a monster, and it is only about a monster.

This is not a failing. It is a classification. Intruders belongs to an older dispensation, one in which a horror film could be merely a horror film, and a bad one at that, without carrying the freight of a social program. The vintage is 2011, but the sensibility is older still, closer to a campfire tale than to a position paper. The film is forgettable, and it is forgettable on its own modest terms. We mark it accordingly and move on to the next specimen.