R-Rated Netflix Thriller Makes You Feel Like A Prisoner In Your Own Home

By Robert Scucci
| Published 26 seconds ago

The almighty algorithm has put me on a weird home invasion kick, but I think I’m going to pump the brakes for a bit after watching 2021’s Intrusion. I’m not a deep lore guy in the sense that I don’t like long-running series that require homework to keep up. I prefer movies because they’re self-contained, and usually limited by a tight runtime. Within those limitations, you can really tell who’s good at storytelling and who isn’t. A three-act structure will always have a setup, rising action, and climax, and within that simple framework, anything can happen.

The problem with this preference is that a 90-minute psychological thriller can either be totally groundbreaking or completely by the numbers. There are beats, conventions, and recurring motifs that need to happen to get the ball rolling. I’m not talking about the outliers here. Not everybody is a non-linear storytelling genius with a penchant for surreal imagery. Most movies follow very simple rules, and how they use those rules will make or break the project.

Intrusion falls into the latter camp. It’s about a woman and her husband who move from the East Coast to New Mexico to live in their brand new, custom-made luxury house. The woman has unaddressed trauma from her past and is also a therapist. Her husband is an architect. Their house is broken into, which makes her suspicious of everybody. She looks crazy until she’s vindicated. Sound familiar? Because I just described every single by-the-numbers psychological thriller released over the past 20 years.

You Know There Will Be One Of Few Possible Twists

Psychological thrillers like Intrusion get off on their twist endings. Maybe the home invaders were the friends we made along the way. Maybe the ghost is actually your childhood trauma. Maybe those weird noises coming from the house your architect husband built and is acting suspiciously about are a pretty good reason for you to think he’s up to something.

Intrusion leans into every single trope without offering anything that separates it from the pack. We’re introduced to Meera Parsons (Freida Pinto), a cancer survivor who fears she’s getting sick again. Her husband, Henry (Logan Marshall-Green), takes care of everything for her, coming off as just a little too overprotective and controlling. Their magnificent house gets broken into, but nothing is stolen. Most notably, somebody has been rummaging through the office like they were looking for something very specific.

Meera begins to spiral because of her trauma. The same people break in again, revealed to be the Cobb family, but this time Henry has a gun, one he’s been hiding from Meera, and kills two of them. The surviving Cobb, Dylan (Mark Siversten), is left in critical condition. It’s later revealed that the Cobbs were the contractors who worked on the Parsons residence, and for some reason, they have it out for Henry.

Henry, seemingly unfazed by the fact that he just killed two men, installs a new security system to placate Meera and assures her she’s just having a hard time. He goes out to run errands at exactly the same time Dylan dies in the hospital. Meera heads to Dylan’s home and learns about his missing daughter. She finds a videotape but doesn’t have the right device to play it, so she’s stuck in a heightened state until Amazon Prime can bail her out. Meanwhile, there’s a random banging sound in the house that only gets louder throughout Intrusion, making you wonder how they’re going to explain it.

Good For Tourists, Bad For Genre Nerds

I’ll say the same thing about Intrusion that I say about most psychological thrillers in this lane. It’s a solid entry point for a younger audience. While I didn’t know the exact twist going into it, I had it narrowed down to three possible outcomes, all of which overlap but still need to play out separately. You learn to spot the signs early. The whole Chekhov’s gun thing. Psychological thrillers have their own visual language, and once you’re fluent, movies like Intrusion become exhausting because you’ve seen it all before.

In this context, the guy who acts like he’s up to something is up to something. The people framed as villains, who get taken out by the guy who seems suspicious, are probably not the real villains. The banging in the house designed by the suspicious guy probably ties directly into whatever he’s hiding. And the mentally unstable wife is not actually unstable, and will be vindicated right around the midpoint of the third act when everything blows open. Congratulations, you’re mediocre.

Intrusion is a Netflix original and can be streamed with an active subscription.