Intrusive 2025 (Insurgence, Studio Dome) Review
Intrusive gets off to, er, bit of a rough start that’s for sure. The film opens up where Kelly (Sherill Quinn) makes a hotel visit to Sabina (Rhoda Jordan) to perform some hypnotherapy to help her with her demon possession. For the 1st 8 minutes, we are in a hotel room with still shots and lots of dialogue. Rhoda Jordan and Sherill Quinn do their best with the material, but there’s nothing that really hooks you in the start. The film starts by only cutting back and forth between two angles, but thankfully some more variety is introduced later on.
There’s only so much fun you can have in a hotel room.
Now it’s not all bad, there are small moments that do work. When Kelly starts the hypnotherapy and talks about a forest, we do get a cool scene in the forest that helps to immerse us in the world. The film definitely needed more of this, as there is lot you can do with sound and visual’s to help make things more weird and demonically twisted as Phentara the demon takes over Sabina and starts talking. Like for example, when Phentara talks about how she had to claw a long ways to get to where she is, we could have a POV shot of someone crawling in a desert or beach or something. But the first half of the movie is a bit slow and drags due to it’s dialogue heavy stilled nature.
The 2nd half however, does get more entertaining and interesting. We cut to Kelly’s boyfriend Paul (Richard Caines) who is taking care of their baby. He soon experiences a psychotic episode and almost loses the baby. Eric Shapiro, the director, also plays a character here as Dr. Kleinbaum. His performance is really good and comes across with the right amount of creepy. Even though you can tell the baby is a doll at parts of the film, there is a cool visual effect they pull off with the baby getting stuck in a tree. The film also has some creative time jumps.
This guy is having a bad day for sure.
The sound quality also has some issues, mostly in the hotel part of the film, with some of the dialogue sounding off to the side. There is a scene with the baby crying in the car which goes on for way to long, where your ears almost bleed but I guess that’s a part of parenthood. The closed captions were also oddly delayed in the version I watched. But if you can get through the first half hour, things do pick up 2nd half.
The plot ends with a twist, as most of these movies in this genre do. It’s predictable, but it does the job. The film has a lean runtime of 66 mins, so nothing drags on to long. The small cast of actors is devoid of any real bad acting. Intrusive just needed more of a strong start, as I feel as it is now, people will hop off of it before they get to the better 2nd half.
