Intruders in 200 Words or Less

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The first scare in Intruders works on a primal level that hits right at home for that scared little kid hiding inside all of us. It's nighttime, there's a storm, and we're the little kid who's done something our mother told us not to do and now our carelessness has put her, our mommy, in danger. Horrifying. Elsewhere there are succinct flourishes of this sort, times when the film boils down that essence of deeply universal spookiness - like when we force ourselves to be strong, facing down the nightmares that cannot be real, must remain inside our imagination, only to have them reveal themselves at that moment as very real, and very tall. 

Unfortunately there's a whole lot of gobbledegook surrounding these moments that I just didn't care about, and instead of bobbing along an eerie ebb of dread more often I felt myself sinking sank sunk under scatter-shot exposition. It tries to shake up an old-fashioned tale with some modern storytelling - two seemingly unrelated but overlapping stories! - but I found it mostly distracting, and sussing out a purpose from the villain's shenanigans remained inexplicable to a fault. Intruders mistakes murk for mystery.

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