Paranoid suburban thrillers like Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window get a timely contemporary update with The Saviors. Cultural fears and conspiracy intertwine in director Kevin Hamedani’s provocative genre-bending mystery, one that builds to a sobering conclusion despite its subdued restraint.
Adam Scott (Hokum) and Danielle Deadwyler (The Woman in the Yard) star as a couple, Sean and Kim Harrison, on the brink of divorce when they rent out their guesthouse to a pair of mysterious siblings. The unemployed Sean spends his days getting stoned or bickering with his conservative family that includes his sister Cleo (Kate Berlant) and parents (Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp), much to the dismay of Kim. Her frustrations with her estranged spouse only get worse with the arrival of new tenants Amir (Theo Rossi) and Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi), a secretive brother-sister duo whose enigmatic behavior awakens mistrust and prejudice in the suburbs.
Hamedani, who co-writes with Travis Betz, signals post-apocalyptic genre leanings early with an opening nightmare sequence but quickly settles on quiet paranoia that scrutinizes the behaviors of its central foursome. At the forefront, of course, are the Harrisons. Scott’s Sean is caught somewhere politically between his empathetic, progressive wife and his conspiracy-spewing family, leaving him prone to social blunder after social blunder when it comes to his polite new tenants. To that end, The Saviors frames much of its story from the intimate perspective of a crumbling marriage, preserving the mystery behind Amir and Jahan’s strange dealings. The stranger things get, the more complicated the marriage as Sean and Kim are forced together in ways they hadn’t been in a long time.
Rossi and Boniadi bring a tender vulnerability to the siblings that ensures there’s no guessing where The Saviors will ultimately head, even as it settles into a more cyclical rhythm that sees Sean frantic to expose their latest peculiar act. It’s clear that siblings Amira and Jahan are up to something; their windows emit an eerie green glow in the middle of the night, and pets around the neighborhood soon go missing. Instead of Dante’s pitch-black humor sowing division and mistrust, though, Hamedani instead opts to keep the proceedings straightforward and matter-of-fact. It’s more Rod Serling than Hitchcock.
Greg Kinnear dials up the energy and the genre elements with comedic antics as Cleo’s private detective lover that herald in the final act, one that pulls the rug out with a timely, sobering vision that blurs fiction and reality. Worse, its messaging arrives potentially too late and in vague fashion. The Saviors has a lot to say about Islamophobia, neo-Nazism, and prevalent prejudices without ever veering into heavy-handed or preachy territory, but it’s also not very incisive about any of it. Hamedani instead uses this left-field shocker of an ending to reframe the film’s preceding events, a means of inspiring self-reflection in the viewer.
Tone is The Saviors‘ biggest struggle in an effective and provocative thriller. Hamedani is too constrained with both the humor and sci-fi here, doling them out in short bursts in preservation of the overarching mystery. While the filmmaker more than succeeds in delivering an unpredictable ending that sticks with you, his darkly comedic paranoid thriller isn’t as sharp or as sharply defined as it should be. But it’s still a thoughtful and engaging enough genre-bender all the same.
The Saviors made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.
