Home invasion horror has seen its fair share of permutations over the decades, from the noir anxiety of Experiment In Terror to the because-you-were-home stalking of The Strangers. Julius Berg’s promising directorial debut The Owners belongs to a subversive subcategory in which secrets within unknown abodes confront intruders with more than they ever expected.
The film sets up a lookout and break-in by a group of young thieves: Gaz (Jake Curran), Terry (Andrew Ellis) and Nathan (Ian Kenny). A tantalizing rumor of a safe loaded with cash has drawn them to the isolated home of an elderly couple who have just gone out. owners just left. The thieves are there for a quick easy caper, while Mary (Maisie Williams) has only come along because they took her car. Comparisons to Don’t Breathe may be obvious and unkind, since Berg doesn’t take the time to introduce his burglars or make them likable or interesting. Our sympathies eventually lie with Mary, less so because of her characterization (which is initially slight) but because she’s not one of the reckless, crass, harebrained crooks inside. Yet even she is eventually drawn into their black hole of poor decisions.
But this film isn’t named The Intruders, and the eponymous absence looms over the early scenes of careless crime. Once elderly owners the Huggins unexpectedly return, The Owners begins to shift into something altogether weirder than its familiar-yet-clunky home invasion thrills, and veteran actors Sylvester McCoy (the seventh Doctor Who) and Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey) provide the unsettling catalyst the film desperately needed. Their off reactions, odd comments and crafty needling escalates claustrophobic tension towards power-tools nastiness and gaslight games. It’s a suspenseful dynamic that allows these flat characters to crystallize into memorable personalities. In particular, Jake Curran’s Gaz emerges as a pathetic and deranged threat that threatens everyone with hair-trigger cruelty. Williams brings a resourceful intensity to the ensuing nightmare, while McCoy and Tushingham counter with their increasingly uncomfortable behavior. McCoy’s patriarch exudes a wicked intelligence, like a spider content in his web, every other word tinged with cunning, while Tushingham plays his wife with a delirium that crackles and ebbs from dementia haze to jabbing venom in an instant.
Amid the couple’s askew air, The Owners tightens into taut twisted menace, a terror-vice progression that even squeezes the aspect ratio into a disorienting porthole. What begins as an inelegant spin on Don’t Breathe trading Detroit for the English countryside gradually transforms into something more akin to The People Under The Stairs or The Loved Ones. Like those movies, outward normalcy peels away to reveal a labyrinthine array of horrors beneath. A frantic onslaught of sudden shocking gore and bizarre unease is a worthwhile reward for enduring this horror-thriller’s crude first act.
Despite some narrative stumbles, Julius Berg’s debut delivers an intense 90 minutes. Viewers who stay with The Owners past its unlikable characters and initial clumsiness will be rewarded by a film that’s confident in its devilish excess and splashes of crimson.
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