Some Visitors
2022 · 28m · United States
Directed by Paul Hibbard
A woman mourning the loss of a child is home alone in an area that has been afflicted with recent home invasions. She receives a knock on the door from a mysterious man who wants to be let inside.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is grief-as-threshold horror—which sounds like Every Sad-Haunted-House Movie until you realize the film's actually interested in whether she *lets him in*, not whether he's real or not. That's the subversive move: interrogating consent and vulnerability instead of jump-scares.
Hibbard situates this squarely in the home-invasion tradition while grafting on Bresson-ian restraint—the film's formal control (what we don't see, what we're forced to imagine) positions it as a serious interrogation of the genre's ethical grammar rather than a exercise within it.
The decision to keep the camera almost entirely on the woman's face—trapping us in her decision-making calculus rather than showing us the threat—transforms what could be generic tension into something that hinges entirely on the actor's micro-expressions and silences.
Reviews
Some Visitors is one of the best-executed home invasion thrillers I've seen in a long time. I mentioned that Hibbard had mastered the art of tension and release, and he's relentless — like a never-ending rollercoaster.