There’s a long history of bad boyfriends in horror. From The Creature from the Black Lagoon, to Billy Loomis in the first Scream, to Jack Reynor’s Christian in this year’s Midsommar, sometimes the most dangerous thing a woman can do is date a man. Into that tradition steps director Orson Oblowitz’s Trespassers, a thriller about two struggling couples who rent a house for the weekend only to be terrorized by masked men with machetes. It’s a fairly familiar premise, but despite a promising start and some genuine surprises, Trespassers never manages to feel fresh or exciting.
The first bad boyfriend writer Corey Desmond introduces is actually a husband, Zach Avery’s Joseph. He and wife Sarah (Angela Trimbur) arrive first and it’s both hard to miss the subtle chill between them and easy to guess that a recent miscarriage is the cause even if the characters don’t say it until much later. Equally easy to surmise is that Joseph isn’t bad because of the ways he may or may not have been emotionally present for Sarah in the aftermath of their loss, but because he cheated on her with her old roommate, Estelle (Janel Parrish)—the girl who just happens to be half of the other couple staying in the house. Estelle comes with her own bad boyfriend, Victor (Jonathan Howard), a coke-sniffing douche who says something nasty about immigrants and then tries to play it off as a joke when nobody laughs.
They’re well-worn archetypes and experienced horror viewers will likely be disappointed by how quickly they can figure out each character’s fate—especially since the actors don’t do much to put new spins on the tired tropes at play. Victor is just a bastard the audience will enjoy seeing punished. Sarah is damaged but sympathetic while also being given nothing to do. Avery is beautiful but wooden in a way that makes it easy to believe Joseph has left Sarah emotionally adrift in her grief and hard to buy into his sadness. The only actor who makes an impression is Parrish, who plays her character’s sexuality and manipulativeness to the max and makes us wish the camera would stay with her the whole time.
Still, while the audience knows thanks to a violent prologue that it’s only a matter of time before the titular intruders appear to help fulfill the characters’ destinies, perhaps the most surprising–and ultimately frustrating–thing about Trespassers is how long it takes to get to that point. Rather, it’s the ways Desmond delays the expected end that are most enjoyable.
The first surprise comes when The Craft’s Fairuza Balk knocks on the door. Though her character claims to be a neighbor with a broken-down car and no cell service, the couples are immediately suspicious. Though those suspicions turn out to be justified, it simply makes no sense that the characters wouldn’t trust this seemingly normal woman based on her first scene. They don’t know they’re in a horror movie and even a line that’s supposed to make Estelle question the woman’s integrity later doesn’t read that odd in the moment. Instead, what’s surprising about that character is what eventually happens to her. It’s impossible to describe without spoiling the fun, but it’s essentially a version of one of horror’s all-time great twists.
However, good as that moment is, it’s unfortunately the film’s peak because so much of the film mistakes stagnation for suspense. The audience spends so long fearing the eventual intruders that when they finally arrive, they can’t help but seem less dangerous than imagined. Sure, the film still has a few tricks up its sleeve (particularly when it comes to Carlo Rita’s cop character), but they simply aren’t enough to overcome the disappointing character arcs.
Though Trespassers initially seems to understand just how bad these boyfriends are, it’s ultimately Joseph whose trauma after the miscarriage is foregrounded rather than Sarah’s. Both she and Estelle are blips on his path to redemption. They are objects to be tortured and punished and saved, given no real emotional arc of their own. It would be infuriating to see the film fall into the same old sexism as so many horror films before it if it weren’t simultaneously so utterly predictable. Trespassers is certainly a horror movie, just not in the way it intends.
