In the bone-chilling 'Invader,' a newcomer finds darkness at the edge of Chicago

You might recall the revelatory scenes in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 classic “Unbreakable,” in which Bruce Willis’ David Dunn has visions of a horrific home invasion by a sadistic killer. I was reminded of those sequences by certain plot developments in writer-director Mickey Keating’s bone-chilling horror film “Invader” — but other elements in the movie were reminiscent of “The Walking Dead,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Halloween.”

And if that sounds like we’re going to be a bit vague about which genre the film eventually lands on, so be it. It’s best if you experience this raw and pulse-pounding thrill ride with as few spoilers as possible.

Filmed in Chicago suburbs including Homewood, Flossmoor and Morton Grove in a hand-held camera style that occasionally draws too much attention to itself but is on balance an effectively unsettling technique, “Invader” stars Vero Maynez in a strong yet vulnerable classic Final Girl performance as Ana, who has arrived in town to stay with her cousin Camila (Ruby Vallejo). Ana exits a bus that is lit like the corridor in a Kubrick film and enters an empty Metra train station. No passengers, nobody on duty, just the occasional muffled and indecipherable message emanating from the P.A. system. Let the feelings of uneasiness commence.

A taxi driver (Jim Sikora) pulls up, hardcore metal blasting from his cab. When Ana gets a glimpse of his menacing visage, one eye covered in a ratty bandage, she decides maybe it will be best not to get in this cab. She takes off; the angry cabbie pursues her on foot, but she manages to escape, but we’re still not sure if she needed to escape, or if the guy was just mad that she skipped out on him, or what.

Ana is unable to reach her cousin on the phone. She starts walking, perhaps not realizing how long it will take her to reach her cousin’s house. We see Metra trains whizzing by, and we see American flags waving in the breeze, but where are the people?

Even in the light of day, “Invader” has a forbidding sense of gloom and darkness. When Ana visits the grocery store where Camila works, the rude and dismissive manager (Sanjay Choudrey) tells her Camila didn’t show up today and essentially kicks Ana out of the store. Nobody wants to help, until Camila’s friend and co-worker Carlo (Colin Huerta) offers to give Ana a ride to Camila’s house and help her figure out what is going on.

Around the halfway point, “Invader” announces exactly what kind of film we’re watching, answering questions that were lingering in the early sequences. The filmmaker Joe Swanberg (who is a producer on this movie) is an onscreen force here, playing a certain character who creates violent chaos in sequences that bookend the film, and let’s leave it at that.

Writer-director Keating knows how to deliver the goods in lean fashion, with “Invader” clocking in at just 70 minutes and ending on a fantastically creepy note of utter dread.