Intruders | Movie review

Seeking to extend the list of supernatural horror villains with comically unfrightening names beyond Hellraiser’s Pinhead, Intruders sics a hooded figure named Hollow Face on two young children, one in the U.K. and one in Spain. The latter’s mother, played by Pilar López de Ayala, naturally turns to an exorcist for help, while British dad Clive Owen takes a more physical route, though fisticuffs prove no more effective than holy water.

Given that Owen’s character’s daughter (Ella Purnell) has a propensity for drawing stories that feature Hollow Face as their protagonist, it seems as if the face-stealing bogeyman must have sprung from her imagination. The eventual endgame is both more far-fetched and more mundane, though, falling short of the nifty genre hybrids contrived by The Others and The Orphanage. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto, 28 Weeks Later) has decent horror chops, but he’s deaf to the story’s broader resonance, ginning up scares without furnishing any reason to care what happens to whom. After a while, it’s like being yanked through a haunted house by an impatient child. (Available on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray Tue 17.)