Invasive is a 2024 survival horror film directed by SyFy alum Jem Garrard. The film follows the young, grieving Kay (Khosi Ngema) squatting in pharma billionaire Pierce’s (Francis Chouler) secluded mountain home. But when Pierce returns home early, a tense game of cat-and-mouse ensues. Pierce isn’t a normal evil billionaire but a mad scientisttesting his new pharmaceuticals on unwilling victims, especially those who irk him. And Kay is right within his grasp. Released just this year, Invasive has too few reviews to even have a Rotten Tomatoes score. But the real stand out of this scrappy little Tubi original comes in the form of its lead actors. Chouler and Ngema both put on gripping performances that alone make Invasive worth a watch.
‘Invasive’ Is a Tense Cat-And-Mouse Game of Power
While Invasive does have supporting characters, Kay and Pierce carry the brunt of the film. Khosi Ngema plays at the desperation and isolating nature of such a lavish yet remote home. The brutalist angles she critiques at the beginning of the film become a prison of Pierce’s own design. Ngema’s Kay is haunted, young, and vulnerable but clever and, above all, a survivor. With wide, wet, panicked eyes she sprints about the hollow, concrete home trying to escape.
Khosi Ngema brings a doe-like yet gritty effect to her performance as Kay. She’s charming and cute in the company of her friend, Riley, but the girlish smile that makes her so easy to love melts away in an instant at the sight of Pierce. It isn’t only when he’s an active danger to her, either. Earlier in the film, before she’s begun squatting in his house and is there legitimately for work, there’s a tight-lipped discomfort to Kay while in Pierce’s company. Surely, as a young working-class woman, part of this is the class and age disparity between them. But Ngema plays a subtext of understanding with Kay — as though, well before she meets the real, homicidal Pierce, she can tell there’s something off about him. The film opens at a party Pierce is hosting, and the only person in the room who immediately clocks his false, public-facing persona is Kay, who is working at the party as a waitress.
Kay is extremely easy to like. She’s written as sympathetic and competent — two qualities a lot of horror protagonists struggle to hold at once. Ngema expertly conveys the abject horror of Kay’s circumstances in a way lesser actors would fail to. She doesn’t just play at the immediate dangers Kay faces, but at the background radiation of trauma and struggle Kay experiences. Kay is young, actively grieving her mother, navigating a complicated relationship with her father, and economically disenfranchised. There is not a moment in the film where this isn’t present. Even before it’s revealed why Kay is working at this party and squatting in Pierce’s home, these aspects of Kay’s life haunt her every movement. Before the immediate danger of Pierce comes the complicated, heavy, domestic horrors of her everyday life. Kay walks with a weight on her shoulders that is clearly too heavy to bear, but she’s too stubborn to put it down.
Francis Chouler’s Pierce Is a Chilling Take on the Tech CEO Trope
This is not to say Kay is more haunted by grief or her working-class background than she is by the billionaire hunting her for sport. Another fantastic performance in Invasive comes in the form of Francis Chouler’s Pierce. Chouler plays Pierce as if Patrick Bateman was 10% less impulsive and 40% more of a weird, pathetic, loser who so desperately wants you to think he’s cool. A character like Pierce— rich, smart, powerful, and quite literally compared in-script to Batman — would be easy to play as cool and threatening. However, Chouler chooses to imbue the character with a subtextual pathetic air that makes the film so much richer.
Pierce gets a few of these haughty, self-absorbed monologues throughout that film that, if played straight, would be boring and eye-roll-worthy. But Chouler doesn’t play Pierce like an important man with important things to say. He plays him like a man who thinks he’s important and worth listening to. Pierce might have the material success, but there’s a nagging, narcissistic, insecurity about him. He reiterates throughout the film that his time is too valuable to waste. His efforts to punish those who waste his time read less like a disappointed father scolding his child for breaking the rules, and more like a spiteful, spoiled brat throwing a tantrum for not getting his way. The difference can be subtle but is noticeable in a film that is largely carried by the characters of Pierce and Kay.
Pierce plays at apathy — as though he’s above anger and lashing out, but it’s as much a mask as the “charitable pharma genius” he plays for the public. He might maintain a chilling, disaffected expression, but it isn’t genuine. He considers others beneath him, surely, but true apathy does not beget revenge. It is not the child that doesn’t care about ants who sets their hill ablaze — it is the child who despises them. Even Pierce’s choice of murder method reeks of insecurity and anger. He poisons his victims through contact-based stickers containing a toxin of his own design. The method is reliable and cowardly in equal measure; these people are so beneath him he doesn’t want to touch them. And even though he considers his victims below him, he’s too afraid to give them the chance to fight back. Pierce acts like an entitled child bending the rules of tag out of spite because he can’t manage to tag any of the other kids.
Khosi Ngema and Francis Chouler Play Off Each Other Brilliantly
This conflict within Pierce between what he truly is and what he projects himself as is also partially why his dynamic with Kay is so fascinating to watch. Kay clocks his insincerity from the moment she meets him — even if she doesn’t know why. Her later witnessing of Pierce’s methods makes the cat-and-mouse game between them all the more intriguing. Pierce can’t use his usual methods with Kay because he can’t hide behind the same facade. Pierce might be older and physically larger than Kay, but he’s so intent on maintaining the artificial separation he’s built between himself and other people that he doesn’t even seem to consider just chasing her down and killing her like a normal murderer. Kay being such an open book makes her eventual deception of Pierce genuinely surprising because, unlike him, she isn’t constantly lying to herself and others.
Khosi Ngema and Francis Chouler have fantastic chemistry together. In a perfect world, there would be ten Tubi originals where they terrorize each other for 90 minutes ready to queue up immediately after finishing Invasive. Unfortunately, that is not (yet) the case. But at least we got one. Ngema’s Kay is quick-witted and terrified with a dual strength and vulnerability that makes it impossible not to root for her. Contrast that with Chouler’s flat affect and disaffected annoyance, and you have a killer/final girl combo that’ll have your eyes glued to your screen. Their performances alone will have you at the edge of your seat for a film that can be easy to miss scrolling through Tubi.
Invasive is currently available to stream on Tubi in the U.S.
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