“The Intruder” on Prime Video: Paul Meskal’s marital and dystopian drama that leaves a lot to be desired | FOE | Review | Saoirse Ronan | Aaron Pierre | Stranger | Streaming | Video | SKIP-ENTER

One of the main requirements for a good film aspiring, a talented cast that achieves at least harmony in front of the camera, seems to have been fulfilled to a large extent in Garth Davis’s “.intruder”, his adaptation of the book published in 2018 by Canadian Ian Reid.

Released in the last third of 2023 in select theaters in the Northern Hemisphere, the film has just reached streaming via Prime Video. Over the course of about an hour and a half, “intruderpresents the story of a young couple made up of Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan). The couple married seven years before the events (2065), when they were just teenagers who had just finished school.

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Junior and Hen live in a 200-year-old house in the middle of a desert town that seems to be split in two by an endless highway. He works as an operator in a kind of (futuristic) poultry farm with giant chickens. She is a waitress in a cafe located in the middle of the highway. There are no neighbors, close friends and even less family that the lead couple can rely on in an emergency.

This initial approach is preceded by a series of messages in gold letters and a black background: Overpopulation has caused many shortages and food crises, so the government is trying to build colonies abroad to avoid what seems to be the end (although they never will. say so). Furthermore, the so-called “’Human Substitutes’, Artificial Intelligence with Consciousness, Institutions That Will Begin to Replace Human Labor in Earth’s Most Devastated Areas“

At least in his opening statement, “intruder” (originally “enemy”), makes sense. And Davis’s tape does not save anything from the beginning. From one moment to the next, an unusual event occurs: a truck approaches the house. Terence (Aaron Pierre) gets out of the car, a government agent. claims to be the one who informs the ‘head of the house’ (literally, as the couple’s approach is vertical, authoritarian and sometimes oppressive), that he has been selected for a project. which will “own a planet” in outer space. “We have an active motivation to help our grandchildren,” Terence Kuan Hein replies sagely, asking why the government spends on this when there is so much to improve on the planet.

Terence tells Jr. that he’s going out, and there’s no way to refuse, he’ll be back in a year for two things: first, to stay home and do surveillance work on the couple (he needs their data to know who’s going to live. Out) and second. , to remove it. With no choice, time starts running. And plot errors and flaws will be revealed, one by one.

Dystopian is an input that is increasingly used in cinema. It is not necessarily the most popular, as it is almost always what many people know as verisimilitude. A few months ago, Netflix released an American film called “Jules”, in which a white, thin and gangly alien with the onset of Alzheimer’s fell into the backyard of a retiree who, despite having two grown children, felt completely alone in the world. It was a new way, but yes Effective Addressing the connection between the unknown, the future, humans and the so-called ‘Beyonds’. Mark Turtletaub’s film didn’t feature special effects or weird twists, but it was based on the special bond that this strange, voiceless old man who took him in (Milton) developed with his friends in the neighborhood, even with the old ladies. was They didn’t even have kids to give them a weekend to talk about.

“intruder” but there is a very real part present, to say the least. Here we present a marital drama between a couple who got married early, perhaps not knowing what is coming their whole life. Except when making love, Junior always seems to be an authoritarian man, not very polite, unable to sit down and listen to his wife or ask her opinions on important decisions. Although sometimes he explodes and raises his voice, he mostly accepts, is patient and only takes refuge in an old piano located not far from his room.

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Many of these aspects are highly visible because the director decided to do so. On more than one occasion, the hen turns to the piano to vent about her inability to get out of the cage in what appears to be her husband’s old family home. This, in turn, is almost always associated with a beer bottle in his hand, a shotgun with which he seems ready to shoot anyone around his property or even naked. Finally, despite the very good care, “Sexuality inintruder

” is excessive, sometimes losing usefulness and even meaning.

About Terence, as the Spanish title of the film suggests to some. The actor who plays him, Aaron Pierre (29), has the same projection as Paul Mescale and Saoirse Ronan. Two years ago he played the notable role of Caesar in Barry Jenkins’ film adaptation of Colson Whithead’s bestseller “The Underground Railroad.” Unfortunately, his potential here seems to be wasted, as at times he is a serious government agent, at times a curmudgeon, at times an insufferable gossip, and at other times a trickster who seems to want to fool the hen. is, which increases Junior’s anger. .

We started this note by saying that Garth Davis had a major success in choosing his small cast. Paul Mescal (that-boy, successor to Colin Farrell, internet boyfriend or whatever you want to call him) confirms in “intruderHe transcends the preconceived notion of ‘just a pretty face’ and exhibits many qualities that will make him an actor to watch closely. His Oscar nomination for “Aftersun” went out of favor. And here it inspires a plot bogged down by subsequent pointless twists (modified appearance and disappearance of ‘human substitutes’) that defy common sense (oil trucks in the year 2065?), in a story that might just be. Even better if it prioritizes the human or, failing that, the futurist.

For his part, Ronan (1994) has the most complex role in the story. She is not part of the “experiment”, but must endure the twists and turns that the man she claims to love will put up with everything. The Irish-born New York actress goes from crying to laughing, through emotion, despair and desire, always with solvency. And the script doesn’t reward her either, as she goes from sentence that starts well, but cheesiness (“He (junior) doesn’t like me to play the piano. Maybe what’s in the music scares you. I do not know. what’s going on All that no longer exists. Affection, prospect, curiosity. It is something important. He liked that about me. At first, everything seems very lively and exciting, but time makes everything predictable …

“).

Ronan, Pierre and Mescal end up, therefore, overwhelmed by a script that grows more confusing by the minute. And if sometimes some adaptations that don’t end so well cause you to find the book (“Leave the World Behind” to give just one recent example), along with “intruder” It doesn’t seem so.