Trespass (2011)

Joel Schumacher's final feature is a home invasion picture that behaves exactly like a home invasion picture. Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman play the Millers, a couple with a gated waterfront house, expensive cars, and a marriage quietly coming apart. Four robbers in security uniforms and ski masks arrive wanting the safe. Then comes negotiation, bloodshed, and a great deal of shouting in a confined space. It is not a film with an agenda. It is a film with a hostage and a nail gun.

The one mild current of social commentary arrives as a plot twist. The mansion, the cars, the diamond necklace: all of it purchased on credit, the family revealed as bankrupt, the father scraping together appraisals to service a mortgage. The thieves are debtors too, working off a stolen drug shipment under threat from a syndicate. There is a faint suggestion here about hollow materialism and the lies people tell to appear solvent. The film never presses it. The revelation exists to raise the stakes and deepen the desperation, not to organize a march.

Elsewhere the picture is remarkably free of contemporary cultural freight. The cast is white and the story is white, and nobody in the screenplay seems to notice or care. Sarah and Avery spend most of the runtime as hostages and objects of fixation, though Avery does crash a car and handcuff a drug-addled captor, which is something. There are no LGBTQ characters, no climate anxieties, no body-positivity gestures, and no lecture. Jonah's mental illness is played as menace, not affirmation. The film settles into a nasty, efficient thriller that wants only to keep us in the room. Schumacher, whatever else he was, understood how to keep a room tense. It has no message, and it does not pretend to want one.