Invader

Mickey Keating is a master of low-budget horror, but Invader, his eighth film as writer/director, is his most minimalist work since his 2015 alien invasion chiller Pod. Since that breakthrough, he's played around with wildly varying styles (the French New Wave in Darling, Sixties exploitation in Psychopaths, Seventies survival thrillers in Carnage Park, and Romero-esque cosmic horror for Offseason), and Invader is no different. But that style is an anti-style: if anything, the ultimate anti-style. This time, Keating delves into mumblecore – or, more specifically, its horror-tinged subset, mumblegore.

That hat is tipped by his prime collaborator: mumblecore mainstay Joe Swanberg, who both produced Invader and stars as the unnamed title character. He doesn't simply break into houses. He invades them, occupies them, destroys them, and leaves nothing but carnage behind. He’s a predator wasp who kills a whole beehive and tears it up on the way out, and Keating opens Invader in the middle of that destruction. The what and the why is unimportant: Instead, cinematographer Mac Fisken’s handheld camera is within inches of the invader’s screaming face, his clumping boots, his pounding sledgehammer, as he tears a home apart for no good reason other than chaos. He’s Michael Myers as a random dude, and the usually spritely and scholarly Swanberg looms through his devastation like a lumbering leviathan. Background radio chatter gives some context, but it’s unimportant compared to the sensation of raw destruction, and the firm knowledge that this is not reserved for inanimate objects.

The target for that inevitable violence is Ana (Maynez), a woman visiting her cousin (Vallejo) and her parents in suburban Chicago. A theatre veteran in her first leading screen role, Maynez fills Ana with the dread of a newcomer to a strange and threatening town. She rolls into Chicago on a late-night bus and is instantly bombarded by an omnipresent soundscape of sirens, speakers, and screeching brakes. She sweats paranoia: Terrified of the taxi driver (Sikora) she calls at 4:30 in the morning, and wary of Camilla’s workmate (Huerta) who is just as worried about her absence, she’s a stranger in a strange land. Race and nationality lurk in the corner of the image, as the Spanish-speaking Ana wanders through suburban streets aggressively adorned with Stars and Stripes. And then she finally crosses paths with the invader, and the violence becomes brief, bloody, unsettling, and bleak.

At a raw and rare 70 minutes, Invader is Keating challenging himself to deliver the leanest, sparest home invasion imaginable. But it’s only minimalist in the story and cinematography (a barrage of shuddering images given ingenious structure by Keating’s longtime editor, Valerie Krulfeifer). The sound design is where Keating really pushed himself and the audience: It’s deafeningly loud, immaculately constructed, and constant, filling in the world around that tight, tight, tight camera work. It’s monstrous and oppressive, informing that unease in Maynez’s performance as it shifts into dread, raw fear, and most especially a final act that reinforces Keating’s intention in a new and radically horrifying way.