It’s difficult to know what to do with the films of Mickey Keating; finding success in low-budget indie filmmaking should always be applauded, but frequently his projects feel like pastiche, hollow aesthetic objects that look interesting but never add up to more than the sum of their parts. He’s dabbled in Polanski-esque supernatural paranoia, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and ’70s retro throwback, each to varying degrees of success. But the common denominator is that most of his projects feel slight, the work of a student who has studied styles and is eager to put that knowledge to use but who doesn’t actually have any real ideas — just a lot of crisp, immaculately conceived widescreen images with mostly dead air in the frame. Keating’s new film Invader doesn’t necessarily buck this trend, but it’s so small-scaled, and so aggressively frenetic, that it succeeds in its much more modest aims. Clocking in at barely 70 minutes, it’s a brisk, merciless exercise, not so much a narrative film as a sensory experience.
Invader begins with a man (Joe Swanberg) demolishing a home in a frenzied bit of wanton destruction; he tears up floorboards, smashes doors and cabinets, and crushes canned goods with a sledgehammer, licking up the splattered contents. We then cut to Ana (Vero Maynez) arriving via bus to Morton Grove, Illinois. She’s searching for a friend, but doesn’t know the area. After an aborted Uber trip turns into a brief but frightening experience, she winds up at a grocery store, the last known location of her friend Camila (Ruby Vallejo). A standoffish manager proves to be of no help, only complaining that Camila never showed up for work, but another employee, Carlo (Colin Huerta), knows where Camila lives and offers to take Ana there. Upon arriving, it’s of course revealed that Camila and her family are the victims of the psycho seen at the beginning of the film, at which point Invader switches gears and becomes pure survival horror.
All of this narrative is dispatched with fairly quickly, as Keating and cinematographers Mac Fisken & Edgar Gomez shoot scenes via a jittery handheld camera with an eye toward maximum nervous energy. There’s some subtext about how the authorities don’t care about poor minorities and how calling the cops to report the disappearance would be useless, but perpetual motion is the name of the game here to the degree that certain scenes even suggest The Dardenne’s Rosetta. Once the film becomes full-throttle horror, there’s a palpable and playful sense of anything-goes mayhem, culminating in a creepy stinger that suggests just how easy it is for an unassuming-looking white guy to move unfettered through suburban spaces. It’s a lark of a movie, not so much constituting a proper story as a few events strung together in order to get viewers to the third act set piece. But what a highly effective set piece it is, all kinetic energy and mounting dread — not bad for a hyper-minimal thriller shot in a week or so with the cast doubling as crew. Keating even sneaks a Sleep song into the soundtrack. Invader is no-budget done right.
DIRECTOR: Mickey Keating; CAST: Vero Maynez, Colin Huerta, Ruby Vallejo; DISTRIBUTOR: Doppelgänger Releasing; IN THEATERS: February 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 10 min.
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