Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Occupant’ on Netflix, a Spanish Thriller About a Man Who Loses His Job, and Then His Mind

Another day, another Spanish movie on Netflix. The Occupant (original title: Hogar) is a new, old-vibe creepy-stalker flick from writer-directors David Pastor and Alex Pastor (who wrote Tarsem Singh’s 2015 flop Self/Less). And that old vibe prompts us to wonder not if, but when it becomes a Preposterous Thriller.

THE OCCUPANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Javier (Javier Gutierrez) has a sad case of has-beenitis. Once, he sold gauzy, golden-hour-all-the-time lifestyles via omnipresent TV commercials for kitchen appliances. Now, he’s being interviewed for a position by two EFFING MILLENNIAL HIPSTERS who look at him as if he’s an 8-track tape of Chuck Mangione’s greatest hits. The rejection stings. And then he has to fight to get his parking validated. Sad trombone.

He drives his no-longer-affordable BMW home to his even-less-affordable marble-caked Barcelona apartment with a gorgeous view and that eternal symbol of wealth in the movies, a Really Long Fireplace. It just ain’t tenable. So his wife Marga (Ruth Diaz) gets a retail job, son Dani (Cristian Munoz) moves from private to public school, he cans the maid and they move into their rental unit in the El Carmel neighborhood like a bunch of (gasp!) middle-class people. After a montage of crappy interviews, he sits in the Beemer, contemplating how he might end up (shudder) shopping at Kohl’s now, when he finds spare keys to his former apartment under the seat. He quietly breaks in, looks at photos of the perfect mom-dad-daughter unit living there, eats some of their corn flakes, and takes a dump on his former toilet.

Javier clearly grieves the loss of his privileged capitalist self, and resurrecting it requires abandoning the job search and getting creative. He stalks the perfect dad, Tomas (Mario Casas) to an AA meeting, concocts a phony story for his own addiction, sidles up to the guy and eventually gets invited over for dinner. He sits where he used to eat dinner, and meets Tomas’ wife Lara (Bruna Cusi) and daughter Monica (Iris Valles). He doesn’t do anything too psychotic at first, but the more he worms into their lives, the more he starts to resemble one of those gross, toothy sea worms that leap out of the sand to snare their prey.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: With its privileged-class post-capitalist theme and crazy-person-from-a-’90s-movie protagonist, The Occupant is Parasite crossed with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s a little, slow-broiling Hannibal Lecter that slowly emerges from Gutierrez’s characterization. It’s not exactly original, but it’s reasonably convincing.

Memorable Dialogue: Javier’s manifesto: “I’m going to grab life, my life, by the horns, without asking permission or apologizing.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The answer is, at the tail-end of the second act. That’s when The Occupant becomes a Preposterous Thriller. Javier builds a fairly precarious house-of-cards ruse, and the first stiff breeze the plot whips up is an eye-roller of a doozy that instigates his inevitable final step into full-fledged, no-lumps, crispy-fried sociopathy. At that point, the film ceases being a tragic character study and becomes a series of plot developments ball-peening our noggins with the corruptive evil of materialist, status-seeking pursuits. And the ending is dumb as hell — if the one person wants to do a thing, why does the one person tell the other person that they’re going to do it before they do it? Because they left their brain unaccompanied in the second act, and it ran off to be in a better movie, that’s why.

The Occupant is a well-made movie with a variety of thoughtful visual compositions and an eye for effectively moody lighting. It also meanders tediously for an hour without really developing its characters; these people are collections of traits retrofitted to the plot so it’s about more than just its own silly-thriller indulgences: Don’t be greedy, ya jerk!

Our Call: SKIP IT. The movie is a long, slow drag on a mediocre cigar, so maybe it’s better after three drinks.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Occupant on Netflix