THE INTRUDER (2019)

Studio:      Screen Gems
Director:    Deon Taylor
Writer:      David Loughery
Producer:  Roxanne Avent, Deon Taylor, Mark Burg, Jonathan Schwartz, Brad Kaplan
Stars:     Dennis Quaid, Michael Ealy, Meagan Good, Joseph Sikora

Review Score:

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Summary:

A young couple buys a Napa Valley home from an unstable man who appears unable to let go of his former house.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

To celebrate a successful business deal, Scott Howard and his wife Annie purchase a remote house on a large property in Napa Valley from Charlie Peck, who lived in the house his entire life. Scott and Annie are initially frightened of Charlie when they see him shooting a deer in the wooded backyard. While giving a tour of the estate, Charlie mentions that his wife Ellen died from cancer and he plans to stay with his daughter Cassidy in Florida upon leaving California.

Scott and Annie host Scott’s best friend and business associate Mike Renfro and Mike’s wife Rachel for dinner. Mike thinks he hears someone stalking in the woods while smoking outside and urinating on a rose bush. Later, Mike finds a cigarette burn on the interior upholstery of his car.

Annie becomes upset with Scott when she sees him flirting with the cashier at an ice cream parlor. Upon returning home, Scott notices that the TV he left on had been turned off.

Annie calls Scott when she finds Charlie unexpectedly mowing the lawn. Charlie claims he was merely in the area as his trip to Florida was postponed.

Annie invites Charlie to Thanksgiving dinner with Mike and Rachel. Charlie is upset to see that Scott changed out a tapestry in the living room. During dinner, Charlie shows more discomfort over conservations about remodeling the house.

Charlie fantasizes about attacking Mike with a wine bottle. Charlie and Mike have an awkward encounter outside as Mike asks if Charlie has really given up his attachment to the house. Charlie grimaces when Mike extinguishes his cigarette on a garden statue.

After Charlie leaves, Mike tells Scott, Annie, and Rachel that he suspects Charlie spies on the house from the woods and also put the burn in his car as retaliation for disrespecting the yard. Mike and Scott search the woods and end up scaring off someone in a truck.

Suspecting a prowler, Scott has a security system installed. Claiming to have been driving by, Charlie arrives to angrily insist against modifying the property. Charlie suggests drunken teenagers were partying in the woods. Charlie also recommends getting a gun for protection, but Scott steadfastly refuses.

Kids partying in the woods wake Scott that night. Scott doesn’t see Charlie watching him from the trees.

Scott and Annie come home to find Charlie doing more gardening. Scott tells Charlie he cannot continue coming to the house unannounced. Charlie overhears an argument in which Scott expresses concern about Charlie being unstable while Annie counters that Charlie is harmless.

Charlie brings over a bottle of wine and helps Annie install Christmas lights while Scott entertains attractive client Jillian Richards at a San Francisco bar. Recognizing that his wife suspects he might be having an affair again, Scott rebuffs Jillian to return home to Annie. As Annie expresses her concerns about infidelity, Scott becomes upset to learn Charlie was in the house while he wasn’t there.

Noises in the night wake Scott and Annie. Charlie secretly spies on Scott and Annie having sex.

Scott meets neighbor Grady Kramer in a coffee shop. Grady mentions that Charlie’s wife Ellen actually died from supposed suicide by shotgun, but Charlie was investigated for her murder. Scott relays this information Annie, who dismisses Scott’s additional concern that Charlie is obsessed with her.

Scott and Annie go out for dinner. Afterward, they stop by the bar at the Royal Hotel where Charlie said he was staying. Scott confronts Charlie and warns him to stay away from Annie.

A truck hits Scott while he jogs. Suspecting Charlie was behind the wheel, Scott calls Mike from the hospital and asks him to dig into Charlie’s background with their coworker Brian.

Mike reports back that Charlie was forced to sell his house because of lawsuits and tax fraud accusations regarding his failed business. Scott asks Mike to check on Annie.

Mike spies Annie with Charlie, who brought a pizza to the house while Scott was in the hospital. Charlie chases Mike outside and ends up killing him with an ax. Upon returning inside, Charlie spies on Annie while she showers.

Scott returns home from the hospital. Scott forces Charlie to leave the property. While reiterating his suspicions about Charlie, Scott learns Annie never saw Mike the previous night. Scott calls the police for a restraining order only to find out Charlie never registered at the hotel.

Brian confirms to Scott that Mike hasn’t been seen since the previous evening. Brian also reports that Charlie’s daughter Cassidy now lives under the alias Vanessa Smith.

Charlie infiltrates the house while Annie is home alone. Annie finally realizes Charlie is dangerous when he explains everything he is doing is for the two of them. Annie finds a secret passage leading to a hidden room where Charlie was secretly living. She also finds Mike’s body. Charlie chases Annie and knocks her out following a struggle. Charlie licks Annie’s unconscious body.

Scott calls Cassidy. Cassidy explains that she actually lives in Maine. She also claims Charlie murdered her mother when Ellen threatened to divorce him and take the house.

Scott rushes home to physically fight Charlie. Annie recovers and joins the struggle. Charlie retrieves his shotgun to go after Scott and Annie. Scott knocks down Charlie with a baseball bat and recovers the gun. Annie calls 911 to report that her husband shot an intruder. Taking his wife’s cue, Scott then shoots Charlie.

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Review:

Most times, I cover new thrillers as early as anyone else, so I don’t have opportunities to check out other reviews even if I wanted to. Sometimes though, often unavoidably as a side effect of social media, I’m well aware of predominant sentiments circulating around critics and general audiences, especially when I’m catching up on home video months after everyone else saw something in a theater.

In those cases, I don’t believe my own opinions end up colored by outside influences. What bothers me more is suspecting my late-to-the-game review merely reiterates what “everyone else” already said about a particular movie.

This seems to be the situation with “The Intruder” at any rate. What I’d heard ahead of time was that the film followed formula to the point of practically inducing narcolepsy in disinterested viewers. But Dennis Quaid gamely playing up the part of an unstable homeowner who can’t let go of his house made it a worthwhile watch for his kooky performance alone.

That sums up my reaction nicely. To rephrase it more specifically in my own words, “The Intruder” is an average movie made better by Dennis Quaid chewing enough fat on his ham to put a kick of personality in the screenplay’s otherwise plain pants. Should you choose to do so, you now have my blessing to stop right here while nodding, “yep, he has the same assessment as everyone else too.”

Meanwhile, I’ll expand my possibly redundant review with the musing that “The Intruder” would have played more enjoyably if Quaid had gone all the way off the leash to become a completely cartoonish creep. Quaid rarely indulges in this kind of villainy that’s better suited for fallen stars cashing out on a DTV quickie. Nevertheless, he makes it look easy, which it likely is for him. Only modestly restrained, Quaid correctly approaches the character of Charlie Peck like a throwaway lark of a gig, yet his MVP acting chops don’t permit phoning it in, resulting in a mildly wild weirdo that keeps “The Intruder’s” sputtering engine chugging.

It’s also probable that Quaid recognized he couldn’t go too far over the top without throwing the rest of the cast’s casualness out of whack. One of the reasons why the teeter-totter between charming nice guy and off-his-rocker nutcase works so well has to do with how shockingly beige Michael Ealy and Meagan Good are as his opposition.

Ealy and Good feature as Scott and Annie, a milquetoast married couple whose names, ages, and ethnicities are interchangeably irrelevant as far as an indifferent script is concerned. Celebrating a big business deal, Scott and Annie purchase a spacious little hideaway in wine country with an eye toward starting a family. Except even after turning over the property, previous resident Charlie has a hard time saying adieu to his former house. Thus begins a series of awkward encounters escalating into an obsessive nightmare where Charlie will do anything to make his frightening fantasy a reality.

Because Scott and Annie are so boringly basic, Quaid comfortably goes on cruise control by allowing Charlie’s inherently unsettling charisma to sow seeds of intrigue. The tactic mostly works to keep the movie relatively engaging. “The Intruder” is all too familiar for anyone who has seen a remotely similar thriller, meaning the film reads like typical home invasion horror with the difference being that the tenants intimately know their assailant.

Stereotyping such as this also means reducing Annie to an oblivious sidekick while Scott stays smartly alert. It’s a comical conceit that’s particularly tone deaf when recycled in a post-MeToo world of prominent female empowerment. “The Intruder’s” rudimentary writing highlights her horrible characterization by giving Annie a keen sense of suspicion regarding her husband’s infidelity. Yet somehow, she can barely detect a whiff of Charlie’s alarming aura no matter how bizarre his behavior becomes.

Just as curiously, Annie is actually the first one to sense something off about the man, calling Scott at work to tell him Charlie suddenly showed up uninvited to mow their lawn. Despite this initial tingling, Annie’s instinct immediately short circuits, rendering her a disbelieving dummy until an inevitable dawning of realization during the finale.

Box art praises “The Intruder” as “a reverse ‘Get Out’ (review here).” I have no idea what that means. No matter which way I try to interpret that comparison, I cannot decipher what it possibly intends to propose. I’d dig into the actual review that claim comes from to find out, but it seems like such a reach to associate a popular title for a pull quote that I won’t even bother.

Antagonist and protagonist indeed have different skin colors. But other than excessive needle drops of auto-tuned hip-hop tracks, I don’t see how race factors into the film at all.

Mood often plays a big part in how any given person receives a movie. Viewed at a different point in time, I might have been annoyed with “The Intruder’s” overreliance on predictable plotting and tired tropes. But coming off of a 1,300-word review of a more complicated film (nearly 2,800 words if you include the detailed synopsis), it was a momentarily satisfying diversion to take in a movie that didn’t demand as much brainpower, either from its audience or from the filmmakers.

Basically, the preferred way to look at “The Intruder” is as a Lifetime movie-of-the-week that happened to have a multimillion-dollar theatrical makeover. Consider it as anything else and you’ll only soak up dulled disappointment. No matter what, we have Dennis Quaid to thank for singlehandedly elevating the entertainment value as much as mediocrity permits.

Review Score: 55

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