![]() Meta knows she is tapping on the door of cliche with some of her lines of attack but her response is to turn in into a concrete knock. In a moment of sheer brilliance, the imagined sound setting swaps from hair salon to funeral mid-conversation and the pair adjust their pitch and tone accordingly. When Inés comes to update her it is in a packed editing studio recording background ambience. One of her colleagues is convinced that Inés has become a conduit for unwelcome paranormal pilot fish that she has herself given permission to latch. The Intruder is full of such surprising flourishes and neat touches. The belated title card that follows arrives on the gilded wings of one of the most breathtaking camera pans you will see in any film this year. This is personified in the extended prologue sequence that lulls us into the false dawn of a relationship drama before pulling back the curtain to reveal the dark skies of psychological horror. These nuanced, yet highly potent mechanics lend Meta’s film a bold sense of originality that allows her artistic flair to sweep away genre assumptions and break from the shackles of the very tropes it exploits. Secondly, that terror hides in the plain sight of workaday normality for those that are burdened with the faculties to witness them. Firstly the concept that true fearfulness is under the ownership of a story’s characters, not a mandate for narrative advancement. Loosely based on the cult 90’s horror novel The Minor Evil, writer/director Natalia Meta takes two of its core themes as the framework for her lively and entertaining genre mash-up. Now, when Inés ties to sing or perform her voice-over duties she is plagued by vocal dissonance and ethereal interference that appears to be emanating from an inner domain no longer under her control. After getting shitfaced at the hotel karaoke, Inés becomes embroiled in a seemingly arbitrary tragedy that destabilises her existence and ruptures her perceptions of reality. On holiday with her latest boyfriend, she experiences a terrifying lucid dream on the plane and has another nerve-jangling episode in a tourist attraction bat cave. Constantly at the mercy of the standards and demands of others, she is a talented but creatively enslaved young woman. ![]() Inés splits her work life between singing in a prestigious choir and dubbing bonkers Japanese flicks into Spanish. ![]() 0 Shares Horror resides deep within everyday occurrences in this elegant genre-spanning psychodrama from Argentina.
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