A decade ago, Spanish film-maker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo made a brilliant debut with his metaphysical thriller Intact, about an occult world of gamblers. Later, he directed 28 Weeks Later, and now there is this, Intruders, a highly conventional supernatural chiller in a very ordinary Hollywood-ised manner. The action unfolds in creepy parallel worlds. In Spain, a sensitive and imaginative boy is terrorised by a ghostly intruder in a hooded parka, and he and his mother are comforted by the traditional “troubled priest” figure, played by Daniel Brühl. And in suburban London, in a 30s-type semi, a 12-year-old is terrified by the same horrifying intruder, a phantom who exerts exactly the same hold on her imagination. Her father is played by Clive Owen, who has a faintly preposterous, macho job welding rivets on high buildings in London. A final twist unites the two strands, and an explanation makes it all hang together reasonably enough, but this is really very humdrum stuff compared to the electric strangeness of Intact.
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