Dis­cov­er the relent­less tor­ment of this home inva­sion thriller

Anna’s broth­er Con­rad won’t stop call­ing her ​“Birdy”, and though he means it affec­tion­ate­ly, the child­ish nick­name just annoys her. Maybe it reminds her of her state of arrest­ed infan­til­i­sa­tion, locked into a rela­tion­ship of inter­de­pen­dence with her broth­er in their child­hood home even though both are now very much adults. Maybe the nick­name makes Anna (Beth Ries­graf) think of the pet budgeri­gar that she keeps in an ornate cage, nev­er able to fly away.

In any case, the spa­cious sub­ur­ban house where she has lived her entire life, with her upstairs bed­room pre­served just as it was when she was a lit­tle girl, has become her own gild­ed cage, and a kind of tomb – the lat­ter almost lit­er­al­ly for Con­rad (Tim­o­thy T McK­in­ney), who ear­ly in the film dies there of pan­cre­at­ic can­cer, leav­ing Anna to face the out­side world alone and for the first time. She is not quite ready yet.

Names count in Adam Schindler’s fea­ture debut. It orig­i­nal­ly trav­elled the fes­ti­val cir­cuit as ​‘Shut In’, a neat­ly pol­y­semic title which not only cap­tures Anna’s sta­tus as an ago­ra­pho­bic inca­pable of step­ping out her own front door, but also sly­ly fore­shad­ows the fate of any male assailant who makes the mis­take of enter­ing her frag­ile domain. Shut In has since been reti­tled for the home mar­ket with the com­par­a­tive­ly bland Intrud­ers, a word that bald­ly announces the home inva­sion plot­ting to come.

A trio of bick­er­ing, would-be thieves (played by Jack Kesy, Mar­tin Starr and Joshua Mikel) break into Anna’s home, believ­ing that she will be out at her brother’s funer­al ser­vice, and look­ing for the bag­fuls of hard cash that Anna’s meals-on-wheels provider Dan (Rory Culkin) has let slip are hid­den on the premis­es. Once they find Anna there, and realise that she is inca­pable of leav­ing, they fig­ure they have them­selves a Lady in a Cage, like Olivia de Havilland’s help­less­ly trapped char­ac­ter in Wal­ter Grauman’s 1964 shock­er. The pres­ence in the cast, how­ev­er, of Macaulay Culkin’s broth­er sig­nals an alter­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ty: a Home Alone-like sit­u­a­tion in which empow­ered intrud­ers have the tables cru­el­ly turned on them by a cun­ning stay-at-home.

In fact what Intrud­ers deliv­ers also riffs on Hitchcock’s Psy­cho, with its inti­ma­tions of a deeply dam­aged char­ac­ter caught as much in a wound­ing fam­i­ly his­to­ry as in a phys­i­cal space. As Anna keeps shift­ing from vic­tim to aggres­sor and back again, we bear wit­ness to a psy­chodra­ma that has been play­ing and replay­ing long before the film’s events began – a repeat­ing sce­nario of abuse hor­rif­i­cal­ly exe­cut­ed and remorse vain­ly sought. The sur­name that Anna shares with Con­rad is Rook – anoth­er word with avian asso­ci­a­tions, but also a piece on a chess board. Conrad’s death intro­duces the end game, but Anna, in her cas­tle-like home (com­plete with faux Ion­ic columns at the entrance) will need both strat­e­gy and sac­ri­fice to clear the board and reset the game.

Schindler plays these cat-and-mouse tropes expert­ly, as hunter and hunt­ed repeat­ed­ly swap roles – but Schindler proves equal­ly adept at play­ing our ini­tial sym­pa­thies with Anna off against our esca­lat­ing moral unease. Here the genre thrills of Intrud­ers gain a deep­er res­o­nance from the twinned motifs of tragedy and trau­ma that have beset Anna since she was 10 years old. In fac­ing the intrud­ers by her­self and on her own home ground, Anna is also con­fronting her deep­est, dark­est mem­o­ries of oth­er forced entries, and work­ing through to a slash-and-burn res­o­lu­tion – and we are ulti­mate­ly left unsure whether being let out might not be worse then remain­ing shut in.

Intrud­ers is released on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD on 6 June cour­tesy of StudioCanal.