By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Vero Maynez, Colin Huerta and Ruby Vallejo
Written and directed by Mickey Keating
Forager Films
This is going to be a fairly short review, since the latest film from independent maverick Mickey Keating runs a swift 70 minutes, and is more about a situation than a particularly involved plot.
Currently playing a brief engagement at a few Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas ahead of wider exposure later this year, INVADER opens with FBI stats about break-ins before jumping into a crime that makes the term literal: Someone smashing the hell out of a home with a sledgehammer. We then meet Ana (Vero Maynez) as she disembarks from a bus at 4:30 in the morning and ends up alone in an empty, uninviting depot. She’s in town to visit her cousin Camila, but Camila isn’t answering her phone and Ana’s attempts to get a cab to her house result in the first of a number of upsetting developments. As she makes her way to Camila’s place, Ana passes through blighted areas rife with trash, faded flags and crumbling buildings; before any onscreen damage is done to humans, Keating immerses us in the broken American dream.
This subtext is furthered by the fact that Ana and the handful of other people we see over the course of the film (with one notable exception) are Latinx, and there’s a hint that one of them is undocumented. INVADER is not a political film, though; these elements are presented matter-of-factly and without underlining. That’s all of a piece with Keating’s overall approach to his storytelling, which is more about telling details than major developments. Ana makes her way around Camila’s neighborhood, finds accruing evidence that something’s very wrong here and receives unexpected assistance from local Carlo (Colin Huerta). The two go to Camila’s house and…
And that’s where discussion of the plot should end, since the scenario is pretty simple, with sparse (largely Spanish and subtitled) dialogue. I wouldn’t be surprised if INVADER’s script was no more than 30 or 40 pages. What matters is the feeling Keating elicits as his almost entirely handheld camera follows Ana through her increasingly desperate and ultimately horrifying circumstances. In its basics, INVADER echoes Keating’s previous OFFSEASON, which also tracked a female protagonist through an unfamiliar, virtually deserted environment, the latter quality especially unsettling here since the locations are suburban, shot near Chicago. (The disorientation even extends to the scene-setting: A broadcast heard during that opening bit suggests we’re in the ’70s, while another in the background of a later sequence places it much more recently.)
As opposed to the composed, slow-burn veneer of OFFSEASON, however, Keating goes for nervous, jittery camerawork intended to put us in the same shaken state of mind as Ana, played with a gripping mix of distress and resolve by Maynez. The sustained shaky-cam will likely make INVADER divisive–and so will the way Keating chooses to end the movie–but to this viewer, the gambit works to keep us consistently on edge, and it does calm down for a crucial stretch of the later going. Throughout, the equally assaultive soundscape by Shawn Duffy and score by Shayfer James complement the bleak cinematography by Mac Fisken and jagged editing by Valerie Krulfeifer–all of these artisans returning from OFFSEASON. Keating has clearly found a team right on his wavelength, and their commitment to INVADER’s aggressive technique will keep responsive audience members jumpy and tense for the duration of the brief runtime.
