First there was the Boogie Man and then came the monster under the bed. And now comes Hollow Face, a hooded figure with no face who enters two different children’s bedrooms in two different countries at night, terrorizing them in the horror film Intruders.
One night in Spain, a young boy (Izán Corchero) trying to get his cat back inside the house sees a hooded figure slip into his room from his open window. Scared but finding the strength to investigate, the boy begins slowly going through the house and sees the hooded monster attacking his mother. “Get off of her, you monster!” screams the child, and the tall, cloaked figure goes after him, seemingly very interested in his face. Just as the monster gets a hold of him, the boy finds himself being woken up by his mother telling him he was having a nightmare…but was he?!
Meanwhile in Britain, 12-year-old Mia (Ella Purnell) is celebrating her birthday with her father, John Farrow (Clive Owen), and the rest of her family and friends when she discovers an old, very short story buried deep in a hole in a tree while climbing after her cat. She uses the old story, which tells the tale of ‘Hollow Face’ – a dark, hooded, faceless figure and his search to steal a face from a young boy – for a writing assignment for school. Since it’s unfinished, her teacher tells her to finish it for credit next week.
Later that night at home, Mia begins to add to the story, but instead of Hollow Face going after the boy, now the dark creature is after a girl. Mia slowly begins to realize that SHE is the girl Hollow Face has chosen to go after and that he is writing the story through her. Deeply scared, she turns to her father whom she has always been close with, and tells him of her fear of a monster in her closet.
John tells Mia monsters are cowards and have no real power and plays a game with her, pretending to destroy the monster to calm her. The next night, however, when Mia can’t sleep and John puts her back to bed, both he and Mia hear sounds coming from her closet. When John slowly walks over to the dark closet to see what’s in there, he sees the same hooded, faceless figure which has been terrifying Mia and the young boy in Spain.
Scary and foreboding, Intruders is a dark thriller that unfortunately loses most of its tension by becoming predictable and redundant halfway through the film. The constant repetition of seeing Hollow Face loom from a dark closet or hover over the beds of the two horrified children goes from being creepy and disturbing to tedious and tension-less.
Clive Owen delivers a solid performance as a father determined to protect his daughter from the evil force that’s terrorizing her. Newcomer Ella Purnell is effective as Mia, the sweet, precocious, and terrified girl who realizes perhaps too late what she has released onto her family.
What could and should have been a very dark, scary, and disturbing movie becomes an uninteresting, slow, boring, and forgettable experience with a weak, unsatisfying, and hollow ending.
GRADE: D+
Intruders hits theaters on March 30, 2012 and is rated R for terror, horror violence, some sexuality/nudity and language.
