The Intruder (watched May 7, 2019)

If you think you’ve seen this movie before it’s probably because you have- one iteration of it or another. “The Intruder” is the latest version of that movie type wherein a person or couple have their livelihoods threatened by a neighbor or angry ex who just can’t seem to cut ties and “let go.” From the original “stalker” movie classic directed by Alfred Hitchcock “Rear Window” that was reimagined in Shia LaBeouf’s “Disturbia,” to Jennifer Lopez’s “The Boy Next Door” and Beyoncé’s and Idris Elba’s “Obsessed,” the premise here remains largely the same: a shot at peace and happiness is endangered by others who simply can’t find that for themselves under their current circumstances.


This time around, the intruder comes in the form of a retiring gentleman named Charlie (played by one of the true film legends in Dennis Quaid) who lost his wife to cancer and hopes to start anew by moving to Florida and reconnecting with his daughter. The unsuspecting couple is Annie and Scott Russell (played by the beautiful Megan Good and Michael Ealy), which is fighting its own struggle to repair a fractured marriage by moving farther from the city into a home more conducive to raising children. Charlie garners the pity of Annie but remains highly questionable in the eyes of Scott. When Charlie insists on helping around the house in an effort to keep its structural integrity intact, he quickly becomes an increasing nuisance to the relocated city couple.


The Intruder is packed with tense moments of confrontation that result in increasingly questionable reactions from the couple. The couple’s decisions will have you screaming in your head with anger (or out loud at the film). What the couple’s actions do not detract from is an exquisitely and increasingly unorthodox character development on the part of Dennis Quaid, which is the film’s most redeeming quality. Although it has a very manageable running time of one hour and forty minutes, The Intruder probably will not prove to be a must-see for many moviegoers. For being only a slightly recycled “stalker/creepy neighbor” film with its share of tense moments and even more questionable decisions, I give The Intruder 2 reps out of 5.


Will you be confronting The Intruder in theaters, wait for its digital/DVD release or avoid it completely? Let me know which way you're leaning either way. How do you think this particularly saturated film type can have new life breathed into it?