Trespassers is a 2019 horror film about two dysfunctional couples who rent a modern luxury desert home for the weekend hoping to sort out their messed-up lives.
There’s a number of legitimately hook-worthy complications at the start of director Orson Oblowitz‘s new thriller Trespassers that for a while feel like they could sustain themselves without the need for horror. Truth is, the horror just about gets in the way of a few early reveals that if left to develop more, might have made this a whole different experience. What we get instead is a fairly regular home invasion story with a few more peaks than valleys, making it a solid if uninspired bit of butchery.
Young couple Sarah (Angela Trimbur) and Joseph (Zach Avery) are going through a rough patch, she just dealing with a miscarriage and not quite ready to get on with ‘normal.’ They decide to spend the weekend in a desert home, renting one online, though Sarah invites her school friend Estelle (Janel Parrish) to join, she bringing her coke-addicted beligerent new boyfriend Victor (Jonathan Howard). Friction follows with some secrets and lies between them until a neighbor (Fairuza Balk) knocks on the door asking for help. However, things aren’t what they seem and soon enough, it’s machetes and madness in a fight for survival.
Set almost entirely in a modern, spacious spread, the labyrinthine layout of the place helps a lot in giving the film some personality, Oblowitz’s greatest achievement keeping us all tangled up in where we are and what’s around the corner. There’s great use of space, foreground and deep backgrounds that are well used throughout. Kudos also go to the sound designers and Jonathan Snipes‘ effective score, a refreshingly subtle bit of accompaniment that doesn’t overrun the action, shifting gears at all the right times.
Most especially though, Trimbur is the genuine highlight, the most convincing and authentic of the bunch, proving herself the best reason to give this a go. I really like this actress, her work in 2016’s Trash Fire still memorable and setting a standard she easily maintains here. An early moment that begins in lust before transforming to something altogether different works entirely because of what she makes of it.
That can’t be said for everything else though, Trespassers not really able to make the horror feel earned, Balk kooky from her entrance and the some contrivances along the way weakening the foothold it managed to grab hold of at the start. A commitment to increasing violence and terror in the second half leave the film with some substantial gaps in logic and plenty of randomness that only end up feeling like filler on a checklist than anything significant. It’s too bad, since there’s an emotional story under this that could have had more going for it if it were in a different genre.
Trespassers knows its audience and does what it can to deliver the expected, and while Oblowitz has a few stylistic flourishes up his sleeve that offer some moments that work well, there’s a familiarity to it all that might keep genre buffs at arms length.