A Visitor
2020 · 5m
Directed by Bret Miller
When a menacing stranger tries to break into her home, Jill realizes he is moving house to house in search of a victim, and that any victim will do.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is fairly standard home-invasion territory until that flip—any victim will do—which should subvert the whole thing, but the execution doesn't seem to push hard enough into the truly unsettling implications of that idea; it plays it safer than the concept deserves.
A competent thriller that understands the grammar of suspense and chamber-based horror, with clear lineage to the Hitchcockian tradition of intimate threat, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal precision or thematic depth that would elevate it beyond solid craft.
The decision to make the killer's indifference—the casual, almost bureaucratic way he cycles through targets—the emotional core rather than leaning into cat-and-mouse games is what makes this work; that tonal choice in five minutes is doing all the heavy lifting.