The Invasion (2007) Derided in its Day, Terrifying in Ours

When Jack Finney published “The Body Snatchers” in serial form in late 1954, he could never have imagined the life it would have in the American imagination. Its genius lies in the basic premise- that people are slowly replaced by alien duplicates, identical in every way except their lack of emotions, with the aim of taking over the world. That disturbing conceit (how do we know our loved ones are our loved ones?) has been mined for political anxieties on cinema screens since the 50s, from the Red Scare of Siegel’s original adaptation to the Gulf War of Ferrara via Kaufman’s 70s liberal paranoid exhaustion. All three films have garnered various levels of critical acclaim, but Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2007 adaptation, The Invasion, has been comparatively ignored, derided on release for its “abhorrent” politics by no less than Manohla Dargis and failing to make back its budget. Yet as Arrow’s new Blu-Ray release demonstrates, this Kidman/Craig flick had a prescience Nostradamus would be envious of. 

Written by frequent Guadagnino scribe David Kajganich, The Invasion updates Finney’s story to 2007-era Washington, a world dealing with the twin terrors of the War on Terror and the increasing prevalence of infectious diseases like SARS. After a space shuttle breaks up in the atmosphere, a mysterious virus begins infecting the Washington DC area, turning people into emotionless zombies. Notably, there are no pods in Kajganich’s vision of invasion, no hothouse in the cellar or seeds in the swamp. When we see the enemy face to face, it’s under a microscope, a virulent and aggressive pathogen absorbing human cells at a frightening rate. That change has significant ramifications for the location of the threat; we are now at risk from within, our bodies becoming battlegrounds against hostile occupation. Nightmares that once were the laughable realm of science fiction have become frighteningly real with the COVID pandemic. 

True, Hirschbiegel’s film looks and feels messy. Village Roadshow rejected the original cut, hiring The Wachowskis and their frequent collaborator James McTeigue to reshoot several sequences for a more action-packed adaptation. This is most obvious in a final act that borrows much from the running zombies formula popular in the mid 2000s; it’s impossible to watch hordes of men swarming over a car without thinking of Snyder’s game-changing remake of Dawn of the Dead. Impressive, yes, but it feels out of place with the gradually rising sense of threat that permeates the previous two acts, a procedural approach that works in the narrative’s favour. What remains is a clashing of tones that never seems deliberately provocative so much as narratively unproductive; there’s even a couple of gaping holes in narrative logic thrown in for good measure and a role for Malin Åkerman that’s so truncated it goes uncredited. 

More successful is the curious decision to intercut multiple scenes to move the narrative forward. It doesn’t always work- Daniel Craig’s Dr. Ben Driscoll is abruptly introduced to the point that we only find out his name in his second scene. But at its best it captures the unsettling experiences of Kidman’s psychiatrist, a woman increasingly caught up in sinister events she barely understands. The opening sequence, a flash-forward to the climax at a pharmacy, nicely sets up the destabilising tone of the following hour and thirty-nine minutes. Credit to Kidman, too, for she plays Dr. Carol Bennell with the steely determination needed to anchor us to such a disorienting story. Craig doesn’t get much to do even, putting aside the chopping and changing of his part, but Jeremy Northam has a genuinely creepy turn as Tucker Kaufman, Kidman’s ex-husband and the likely first carrier of the alien disease. He’s banal menace personified and the film, at its best, catches that perfectly. 

Complimenting a beautiful 4K presentation, Arrow provides plenty of extras on their new disc. Along with four archival featurettes from 2007, there’s two new video essays that consider The Invasion from the vantage point of 2024. The first, “Body Snatchers and Beyond”, is by the always excellent Alexandra Heller Nicholas. Providing an overview of the Finney adaptations with special focus on The Invasion, this is an insightfully drawn critique of the various adaptations and their political implications. Particularly interesting is the focus on patriarchal violence that Nicholas draws out of Hirschbiegel’s version, especially the ways that the menacing infected are usually coded as male while the survivors (Carol and her son Oliver) are either women or children. It’s a chillingly relevant observation in the wake of the pandemic and the spike in violence against women and girls it caused.

This is something Josh Nelson highlights in his contribution to the disc, “That Bug That’s Going Around”. While not delivered with the confidence of Nichols (indeed, it feels at points like he’s reading an essay), Nelson draws extremely relevant parallels between the Coronavirus of 2020 and the “flu” outbreak used to explain the alien virus here. Both essays contextualise the film in relation to The War on Terror and the incursion into Iraq (a historical reality underlined in the film by the presence of TV footage of George W. Bush), but as both demonstrate, the seeds of discontent and malaise felt back in 2007 were only waiting to hatch in the right circumstances of a paranoid 2020, making the film more frighteningly relevant than ever. Perhaps the most chilling part of the whole disc is in one of the archival featurettes, where a medical professional circa 2007 asserts that “pandemic is such a scary word” in a tone that’s evidently meant to reassure the audience about its potential impact on daily life. We shouldn’t be worried of the flu, he suggests. How wrong he was.

Ethan’s Archive – The Invasion (2007)