Early on in Intruders, a preteen girl (Ella Purnell) finds a half-written monster story wedged inside a tree. Reading it aloud to her classmates, she ensnares their attention with the tale’s moody detail, but trails off at the end of the page, unable to think of where to go with the idea on her own.
Intruders itself is the same way. It starts with an intriguing germ of an idea: Where do nightmares come from? Do parents pass them down to their children like heirlooms, or are they born the other way, trickling from the imaginations of the young up to their protectors?
First, though, we’ll get some poorly staged fight sequences, followed by an is-it-real psychoanalytical stall and topped off with a coy climax. When the movie’s protagonist does later flesh out her story, it’s with poor execution … and to an audience of one.
Clive Owen, a terrific actor who has mastered vulnerable vengefulness, plays a fiercely protective father who cares deeply for his daughter Mia (Purnell). His devotion is so pure, in fact, that when she comes to him with nightmares, he builds a life-sized bogeyman out of toolshed supplies and then burns the creature, as if it’s the Wicker Man. It’s a rather extreme response, and one grisly enough in its imagery to create more nightmares than it destroys. Sure enough, it isn’t long before the effigy turns up in Mia’s bedroom.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a young Spanish boy named Juan (Izan Corchero) is being terrorized by the same demon, whose name we learn is Hollowface, on account of its lacking any recognizable facial characteristics beyond bone structure. Hollowface, it will turn out, wants to claim the kids’ visages for himself.
