The Intrud­er

The psy­cho­sex­u­al thriller genre may have been large­ly aban­doned by main­stream Hol­ly­wood after its gold­en age in the 1990s, but it per­sists today in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent form with films like Obsessed, No Good Deed, The Per­fect Guy and, now, The Intrud­er. These titles all fol­low a com­mon nar­ra­tive tem­plate in which a hap­py, ultra-sophis­ti­cat­ed and afflu­ent black cou­ple soon find their idyll threat­ened by a stranger, usu­al­ly a pan­tomime psy­cho who is jeal­ous of their happiness.

The Intrud­er fits the mould per­fect­ly. We open with Scott Rus­sell (Michael Ealy, the epony­mous vil­lain of The Per­fect Guy) at a sur­prise par­ty thrown by his beau­ti­ful wife Annie (Mea­gan Good) to cel­e­brate his busi­ness achieve­ments. He has just ​“closed the big deal”, becom­ing ​“the top earn­er at the com­pa­ny!” The pro­fes­sion­al con­text is ridicu­lous­ly vague, and lat­er scenes that show Scott ​‘work­ing’ at ​‘the office’ rein­force the feel­ing of watch­ing a child play­ing with Bar­bie dolls, imag­in­ing what adult life and hap­pi­ness might look like.

Expo­si­tion is done away with in record time, and our vil­lain is dra­mat­i­cal­ly intro­duced at the ear­li­est oppor­tu­ni­ty. While the young cou­ple is vis­it­ing a love­ly, pic­turesque old house in Tem­pa Val­ley, they hear a shot. The own­er of the house­hold, Char­lie Peck (Den­nis Quaid), has just killed a deer. It is cer­tain­ly a red flag, one which quick­ly empha­sis­es the dif­fer­ences between hus­band and wife that will inevitably cre­ate a rift between them. Scott is imme­di­ate­ly sus­pi­cious, while Annie is more inclined to trust the nice old man sell­ing his house.

One rea­son why this new wave of thrillers is so plea­sur­able is that the dynam­ic the films explore is inher­ent­ly amus­ing. Some nice peo­ple are very nice to each oth­er, until one par­ty starts being too nice. The Intrud­er suc­ceeds in mak­ing this sce­nario less bla­tant­ly para­noid and mis­an­throp­ic than it often appears, stream­lin­ing Charlie’s esca­lat­ing mad­ness in a more real­is­tic fash­ion. It also helps that Quaid, show­ing remark­able ded­i­ca­tion to the role, jumps effort­less­ly between mag­nan­i­mous old fool and evil, psy­chot­ic preda­tor, across the film’s swift run­time. His vibrant­ly red MAGA-esque cap, sweaty white skin and WASPish predilec­tion for hunt­ing and chintzy home décor add a fris­son of sub­ver­sion to proceedings.

Char­lie rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from the usu­al­ly rather restrained hor­rors of the genre. As the cou­ple learn more about the man who refus­es to let go of their new house, the film plunges into dark­er ter­ri­to­ry. The switch to out­right vio­lence in the film’s final moments, when the nice cou­ple is forced to be not so nice any­more, is more graph­ic, dis­turb­ing and sex­u­alised than the polite strug­gles which con­clude sim­i­lar thrillers.

If the genre con­tin­ues to evolve fur­ther in this more real­is­tic direc­tion, we may start to won­der what this means for its more escapist plea­sures. But for now, this esca­la­tion of hor­ror and sur­prise with­in a premise that remains delight­ful­ly ludi­crous only makes the whole enter­prise more entertaining.