Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Intrusion’ on Netflix, in Which Freida Pinto Can’t Make a Generic Psychological Thriller Interesting

It’s pretty much Halloween season, which means Netflix is dropping palletfuls of chillers and thrillers into their bottomless content pit. Case in point, Intrusion, director Adam Salky’s (I Smile Back) psychological home-invasion-slash-nuptial-drama starring Freida Pinto and Logan Marshall-Green. “Freida Pinto,” I can hear you thinking to yourself, “I like her!” Me too. But it may take more than her charismatic presence to save this movie from Netflix’s ever-growing scrap heap of vaguely Hitchcockian generica.

INTRUSION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Meet Meera (Pinto). You’ll like her: She’s a youth counselor who survived a cancer scare. We meet her as she jogs through the New Mexico scrub desert, then returns to her gigantically sprawling ultramodern home that looks like someone dropped a fancy new orthodontist’s office complex way, way out in the middle of Roadrunner-and-Coyote country. She showers off and thinks she may feel a lump beneath her breast, but the doctor confirms it’s just some residual scar tissue. We feel relieved, because Meera seems like a perfectly nice human being who doesn’t deserve to suffer.

Meet Henry (Marshall-Green). You’ll hate him: He’s Meera’s husband. He’s an architect who designed the living crap out of their home, with the type of harsh, sharp-angle, museum aesthetic that has us wondering if they sleep on a concrete slab. (Note: They don’t. It’s a regular mattress with a nice, cushy duvet on it.) By the look of the place, he’s quite successful at architecting — I mean, they can AFFORD things. Henry is a little clenched in the teeth and a little uptight in the butthole, but he says all the perfect things to Meera, like how much he loves her and supports her and if the cancer has returned, he’s here for her, 100 percent, unbudgingly faithful, emotionally and physically. He Brylcreems the crap outta his hair and wears big glasses and hearing him speak and seeing the way he carries himself is so very Henry, portrait of a serial killer.

They’ve been living in the sharp-cornered manse for only two months after moving from Boston, hoping to get away from the bustle; a housewarming party is in the works, and if you’re considering a gift, I recommend some of those child-friendly stick-on bumpers for the countertops, so nobody runs into one and severs an artery. They go out on a date and come home to find the place ransacked. She’s spooked, but he’s calm. The cops come and a cowboy-hatted detective (Robert John Burke) prods Henry about why such a fancy-ass place has rattly plumbing and no security system. NO REASON, OFFICER DETECTIVE SIR, THERE’S NO WAY HENRY IS HIDING SOMETHING, I MEAN WHAT HAS HE GOT TO HIDE? NOTHING HA HA HA NOTHING AT ALL.

Then another break-in occurs, except they’re home this time. Henry pulls a pistol from a Ziploc hidden in a houseplant as Meera’s jaw drops. And then he drops the intruders, putting a couple in the morgue and another in the ICU — just some dirty blue-collar guys from the trailer park over yonder — and he seems perfectly fine with it the next day. Time to clean up the blood, no biggie! Understandably, Meera’s traumatized, partly because of the [INSERT TITLE OF MOVIE HERE], and partly because she wonders if she really knows the guy who’s been her husband for a dozen years. Meanwhile — and perhaps it’s because of our objective viewpoint in comparison to her clouded subjectivity — we sure seem to know exactly who this guy is. Is it really that easy? Quoth John 3:16: NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Intrusion is kind of The Gift, Straw Dogs or Gone Girl (or, gulp, Double Jeopardy) with a bit of Don’t Breathe or Parasite‘s location-as-a-character aesthetic mixed in — and then made as bland and straight-faced as possible.

Performance Worth Watching: (Sees Pinto’s previous credit is Hillbilly Elegy) Welp, maybe her next film will be good! (Sees Pinto’s next film is titled Needle in a Timestack) WELP.

Memorable Dialogue: “What are you?”, Meera asks.

“Your husband!”, Henry replies.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Intrusion is a flavorless title for a flavorless movie destined to blend right into the endless Netflix menu scroll. If you should happen to stumble upon Incursion and have no expectations whatsoever and give it a go, you may find yourself compelled to see it through just to feed the desire to find out what happens, even though you really don’t care about what happens, the hallmark of a movie in which the characters are puppets of the plot.

Intrusion is at the very least slickly directed, brisk of pace and therefore somewhat mindlessly watchable. Weighing it down is the screenplay, which is a collection of plot devices, convenient circumstances, coincidences, cliches and supporting players popping up out of nowhere to explain things and keep things moving lest the movie linger on a word or action for a moment and accidentally develop a character. It isn’t particularly convincing, the way everything Henry says sounds like a false alibi, or the way Meera fiddlefarts around a trailer park searching for clues about what he’s up to, and finding a couple — along with some crass stereotypes about the kind of people who live in trailer parks. Maybe it intends to say something about the class divide, but more accurately, it’s just moronic and insensitive.

Intrusion sometimes has the light whiff of an insightful domestic marital drama, wth maybe a brief thematic nod to Rebecca, but beneath that spritz of air freshener lurks an unavoidable eau de bullcrap. Intrusion telegraphs every plot development to the point where we brace ourselves for the rug to be pulled out from under us in grandiose fashion. But the twist here is, there is no twist. It’s linear and obvious and simplistic. Wrap your head around THAT one, you movie watcher you!

Our Call: SKIP IT. Intrusion is dull and unambitious. It could have been insightful or it could have been trashy, but instead it’s painfully mediocre, a vapid melange of dozens of movies that came before it. Shoulda titled it Interchangeable.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Intrusion on Netflix