The Invasion
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Writer: David Kajganich
Based on: Jack Finney‘s novel The Body Snatchers
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright, Veronica Cartwright, Josef Sommer, Celia Weston
Seen on: 5.8.2026
[Here’s my review of the 1956 adaptation of the novel.]

Plot:
Carol (Nicole Kidman) works as a psychiattrist. When one of her patients starts talking about a fundamental change in her husband’s personality, she believes the woman to have a psychotic episode of some kind. But she realizes that more and more people around her change in strange ways. Among them is her own ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam). When Tucker doesn’t return their son Oliver (Jackson Bond), Carol turns to her best friend Ben (Daniel Craig) for help. Together with a researcher, Dr Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), they trace the behavioral changes back to an alien substance.

When I stumbled upon this film, I wondered why I had never heard of it with that cast and my appreciation for SciFi and horror? Now that I have seen the film, I can understand why it is mostly forgotten: it’s just not all that good, and has a frankly concerning moral.

The set-up of The Invasion isn’t all that bad, I have to admit. I especially liked Carol and Ben’s platonic relationship and the way they rely on each other. Kidman and Craig nail the genuine warmth between the two, and I thought it was extremely refreshing that they do consider romance at times, but seem to mostly prefer to be friends. Unfortunately, the film then pivots to romance after all in the end, without letting us see how they pivot, so that sucked. They should have just stayed friends.

But honestly, this is like sublot D, and was just a personal focus, and not really a focus of the film. It is pretty telling, though, that such a detail within the story is the part that I found most engaging. Because other than that, the movie really doesn’t have much to offer.

The science elements are rather laughable in the way it portrays scientific research (basically three days from the first look through the microscope at an alien substance to a cure against infection from it). The allegorical elements are incoherent when they aren’t outright concerning. The movie’s big moral is basically that to be human is to be violent and that non-violence automatically means hivemind fuckery and I mean, seriously, what the fuck, no.

The cast is good, albeit hampered by a mostly clunky script. Still, one wonders how good they could have been in a different film together. In this one, their good work doesn’t amount to much – too much around them just doesn’t really work.

Summarizing: let’s pretend it didn’t happen.