Night terrors: "Intruders"

With M. Night Shyamalan having blown his King of Suspense rep with recent films, here comes what looks like a showreel tentatively positioning Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto, 28 Weeks Later) as a potential replacement: a hybrid horror-thriller, Intruders seeks to shout "boo!" and its Spanish equivalent simultaneously. Somewhere in Spain, Pilar Lopez de Ayala - a sometime Most Beautiful Woman in the World contender, dowdied down in a variety of inventive, if not always convincing ways - is a struggling single mother struggling to deal with a restless young son; over in London, meanwhile, international co-production couple Clive Owen and Carice van Houten are having similar struggles with their 12-year-old daughter (Ella Purnell). Both kids are being kept awake a-night by faceless monsters that arise from stories they've written - monsters that come to haunt the grown-ups the more their children tell them about it.

Fresnadillo gives the set-up the full things-that-go-bump-in-the-night treatment: creaking doors and floorboards, screeching violins, shifty priests (Daniel Brühl, Hector Alterio), and Kerry Fox (of course "and Kerry Fox"!) in a one-scene bit as a psychologist tossing further red herrings into the stew. Vertiginous paralleling is the order of the day elsewhere: Owen's (unlikely) day job as a welder high above the City mirrors the kid's scramble across the rain-soaked scaffolding outside his house. Still, you'll need a whole lot of patience for it: for the longest time, Intruders appears to be telling the same story in two locations, with only slight differences between the strands, such as the number of parents on hand. (Where butch handyman Owen somewhat preposterously indulges the idea of monsters in the closet, van Houten - as the cinema's most improbable "Sue" - proves rather harder to convince.)

Determindely underlit, and further weighted by that very Spanish need to take such hokum seriously, the whole is simply not as much fun as, say, last year's rattling Insidious, but it nevertheless managed to suck me into its world, enough that I understood why Purnell is left speechless after one of her monsters apparently "rips off" her mouth. It scrapes a passmark for some well-orchestrated jumps, and one belated fairytale image of which Guillermo del Toro (if not Lars von Trier) would have been proud, even if it feels as though there must be a punchier, more energised handling of the same material somewhere: Monsters, Inc., maybe?

Intruders is in cinemas nationwide.