Invader (dir. Mickey Keating)

By: Adam Freed

Nestled in the shadows of Chicago’s immense skyline there lies a labyrinthine system of suburban neighborhoods offering the promise of a small tract of land, a little more square footage and a more affordable view of the American Dream.  In the presumed safety of suburban life, very few people consider the benefits of neighborly proximity, especially when it means being within earshot of someone’s desperate cries for help.  There is a calculated risk present in the choice to take on more isolated living conditions, a risk that marks the terrifying center of writer and director Mickey Keating’s gritty and unnerving suburban nightmare Invader.  Keating’s modestly budgeted independent horror film is a pound for pound dynamo as it illuminates the relative ease with which evil doers may penetrate the inner sanctum of domestic tranquility and disrupt the natural order of peace and harmony.  Audiences are provided with just enough visual stimuli at the film’s onset to solidify that Invader is no ordinary film, and its antagonist is no ordinary man, despite his existence in a world that is painfully realistic. 

Invader follows the story of a young woman who arrives at the outskirts of the second city to stay with her cousin who has mysteriously become unreachable by phone.  Very quickly the film’s bilingual protagonist Ana, played by an engaging Vero Maynez, begins to demonstrate the vulnerable anxieties of a stranger in a strange land.  Invader taps into the feeling of dark isolationism only felt by someone who has experienced the pain of abandonment.  Where Maynez shines is in her ability to capture the debilitating horror one must feel when faced with the knowledge that their current .  There is a sense of unnerving helplessness that Mikey Keating is able to cultivate as his film slowly unravels the realities of a story that roots itself in a reality most commonly hidden in the dark recesses of the imagination.  Although Invader unfolds at times somewhat methodically over its noticeably meager 70 minutes, the film’s third act belongs instantly amongst the indie horror elite. The wandering and unsettling dramatic tension of Keating’s film pays off in a horrifying blaze of terror, making it a film sure to catch fire within genre circles as well as bore itself into the memory banks of those who brave it's brutal realism.

Target Score 7/10 - Chicagoland’s unglamorous concrete sprawl with its overgrown wooded preserves and unmaintained vacant lots act as a backdrop for Invader, Mickey Keating’s bite sized work of horrific realism.  Invader delightfully preys on the common fear of what or who may be lurking at the shadowy edges of one’s neighborhood.