‘The Intruder’ Movie Ending Explained & Full Story: Was Michael Hallucinating The Intruder?

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Directed by Jack Brame, The Intruder is a straightforward film of a home invasion. Playing on the all-too-common tropes of paranoia and fear, The Intruder introduces us to a young man who is plagued by his overactive senses, which detect mysterious movements around him in his new house. 

Spoilers Ahead


What is disturbing Michael?

Michael has moved into his new house in an attempt to start living on his own, without being dependent on his parents. One day, Michael’s neighbor, Joe, comes knocking on his door to introduce himself. Joe tells Michael that he found him passed out on the floor as he was trying to peek inside the window, which had him worried. Michael’s house was once occupied by a lady who was friends with Joe and his wife. Joe takes a good look around the house and, while leaving the place, invites Michael over for dinner. What grabs our attention is how Michael checks the lock system at the doors of his house. At the dinner, Joe and his wife, Olivia, advise him out of the blue to have a good lock system and a security system around the house. Joe recalls the previous owner, Nancy, who happened to be friendly with them, stopped talking to them without any reason before she moved away. When the couple mentions the instances of break-ins around the locality, Michael becomes curious instantly. Michael grows anxious as he believes that an intruder has broken into his house. The next morning, Joe passes on a penalty ticket that has been served to Michael for parking in the street at night. Michael invites Joe inside the house and explains his worries. He is certain that this is not a one-time incident; in fact, he had also heard someone getting in the night before. Joe lists a bunch of precautions that Michael needs to take, like installing a robust security system and changing his locks. He also advises Michael to track his sleep patterns to rule out the possibility of him sleepwalking. 

The same night, Michael can sense a dark silhouette staring at him while he is lying in his bed. He wakes up with a jolt but finds no one in the room. The sleep app is designed to record when the person has trouble sleeping and if they are walking around in their sleep. The app shows that Michael was troubled first by nightmares and a second time on the same night by the sound of footsteps. The locksmith reports no sign of forced entry as the locks are intact. This causes Michael to think that someone possessing duplicate keys might have tried to enter. He takes Nancy’s contact details from Joe and sends her an email. He gets an instant call back from Nancy. Nancy advises Michael to take an escape route from the house as it is haunted. During her time in the house, she was terrified of the unexplained phenomenon that appeared first in the form of little sounds but later escalated to dark silhouettes lurking in her bedroom. The neighbors did not offer her any help, nor did they believe her stories. 


How does Michael have a falling out with Joe?

One night, Michael realizes that someone is knocking on his front door. The stranger begs him to let him inside the house because the temperature outside is freezing. When Michael refuses, the man starts violently banging on the door, and several other hooded strangers join him in tormenting Michael. Michael installs a security system around the house, but it records nothing abnormal. If anything, it is only Michael who is seen walking around his house. The camera records that Michale has even dreamed up the entire scenario of the strangers banging on his door. 

Michael gets himself a pistol as a self-defense weapon. His suspicion about forced entries is further cemented when he finds one of the cameras lying on the floor. To double the security, he even puts sliding bars on his doors. But that does not help either, as he senses someone in his house again. Joe gets worried when he witnesses Michael running around in the front yard of his house in his underwear, brandishing a loaded pistol. Michael becomes nervous when the police car pulls up. After having a chat with the police like a sensible neighbor, Joe advises Michael to put the gun in his safe for good. Although Joe has good intentions behind his advice, his condescending manner grates on Michael. Michael understands that Joe cannot grasp the seriousness of the matter and does not believe his claims either. Unable to sleep properly at his house, Michael crashes at his sister’s place to have a good night’s sleep. Even there, Michael is not spared from the vivid nightmarish images of the black-hooded intruders that he sees in his sleep. He gets an alert from the security system about  motion being detected outside his house. Michael becomes livid when he watches the CCTV footage where Joe can be seen moving around the front door. He hurriedly gets his gun, unloads it, and carries it to Joe’s house to confront him. 

Joe tries to calm an agitated Michael and reminds him that he has been imagining everything he has been paranoid about. Michael does not want to believe him. Joe pins him to the ground and confiscates the gun. He suggests Michael get himself examined by a psychiatrist. Until then, he debars Michael from entering his home. When he returns home, he finds all the security cameras gone. He calls Joe and begs him to help him, but the latter just puts his phone aside and goes to sleep. Right at this moment, a man in a black hoodie is seen eavesdropping on Michael’s rant. The man, it seems, has stolen the cameras.


Will Michael manage to keep the intruder out?

Michael comes up with an idea to catch the intruder. From the parking tickets, he realizes that the traffic cop shows up every night at 2 a.m. This means that the man must notice any mysterious movement around the house. Michael waits by the door and keeps his eyes closed; he does not open his eyes despite the creaking noise of the door. This time, the man in the black hoodie we saw earlier gets too close to Michael but walks out without causing him any harm. Michael fails to catch him as he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he runs outside to ask the policeman about the intruder. The policeman tells him that he has not heard of any reports of break-ins in the neighborhood. Even talking to Nancy does not help him and, if anything, makes him reconsider the condition of his mental health. He goes to Joe and apologizes profusely for his miserable behavior. He tells Joe and Olivia that he plans to move out of this house and move back to his parents’ house. His sister, Jenny, rebukes him for being low on confidence, but Michael has embarrassed himself too much to stick around in this neighborhood.  Just then, Michael notices the recorded footage from last night. In the footage, a man is seen walking around the house, skulking to not get noticed by Michael. This was during the time Michael fell asleep by the front door while waiting for the policeman to arrive. He also finds a piece of foam in his kitchen. He pulls a string attached to the ceiling of his passageway and pulls a hidden staircase down. Terrified by this discovery, he runs to inform Joe. Still unsure of Michael’s reliability, Joe asks him to wait for the police, but Michael has not got much time. He grabs his pistol from Joe’s table and runs away. Joe informs the police and tells them that he fears Michael might cause harm. 

Michael climbs up the staircase and reaches the attic, pointing his gun. The attic is musty and full of entangled networks of pipes and pieces of foam like the one Michael found downstairs. However, he finds nobody in the attic. As he climbs down, he finds a man waiting to get caught. The man implores Michael to let him use his shower. He tries to leave, but Michael will not let him escape just like that. Before the police arrive, the man tries to convince Michael that everything he sees before him is just a dream. The man tries to injure Michael, but thankfully he gets saved in time. 

The film’s ending shows that the intruder had been living inside the house all along. That is why, Michael could sense someone in his house but became baffled when he found no signs of forced entry. There are no answers about the intruder’s identity and his motive. How long he has been living in the attic is another question that remains unanswered. For all this while, Michael had been visited by the man in the attic who appeared like a sleep paralysis demon. It can be assumed that the man’s unsolicited movements in the house caused its previous owner, Nancy, to take off. Nancy’s disappointment also lies in not getting any help from Joe and his wife, who appear to be all too rational. When Joe realizes that Michael has not been hallucinating the intruder, he extends an olive branch to him and offers to let him stay at their house. Too tired of everything, Michael just plans to sleep in his own bed. Jenny, Michael’s sister, arrives the next day to help him unpack his belongings. 


Damayanti Ghosh
Damayanti Ghoshhttps://letterboxd.com/deemem/
Damayanti is a Master of Arts in Film Studies from Jadavpur University. An inveterate admirer of the Hindi popular cinema, she takes equal pleasure in unearthing obscure animation and horror but does not let on much about it. Her favorite book is 'The Motorcycle Diaries'. Her favorite film is 'Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa'.


 

 

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