Fantasia International Film Festival 2023 – Director Grame Arnfield wants you to think about all of that surveillance tech in your house, especially video doorbells like Ring, and whether or not it’s doing more harm than good. Arnfield’s video essay, Home Invasion, is a an oddly chilling and affecting history of the doorbell. However, he expands that topic to address much deeper issues, especially the surveillance state, and technological progress more broadly.

Shot as if we’re watching the film through a peephole, the first quarter of the runtime mostly addresses the creation of Ring and its founder Jamie Siminoff. Arnfield theorizes that the creation of the various generations of doorbells stems from their creators’ deep fears of home invasion. From there, he makes an argument that systems like Ring mine data to sell other products or increase our anxieties. He takes it a step further and adds that it worsens class and racial problems, labeling people in our neighborhoods as the Other, an invader. He notes how these doorbell images are often shared on neighborhood apps and groups where police roam. This is an interesting argument, but the filmmaker doesn’t go quite far enough in linking surveillance tech to matters of class and race. It needed more breathing room.

The film even tackles the history of the home invasion movie, all the way back to D.W. Griffith’s 1909 work The Lonely Vila, inspired by a nightmare he had of someone banging on his door and also his fiancé calling him after waking up in terror, following an earthquake. This entire section is fascinating. The text is juxtaposed with images from horror films like The Strangers, Inside, the Scream franchise, among others. But at the center of the discussion is again technology, how it can’t prevent our worst scenarios from occurring and in fact, may only increase our anxiety. Throughout the essay, Arnfield frames technology as the true invader, a destructive force. He makes compelling points on that end.

The last third focuses on Luddite rebellions of the 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of factory jobs. Initially, none of this seems to make much sense in the context of the doorbell, and it’s a bit of a wild leap. The essay expands to address technological “progress” and displaced workers, which feels like its own topic. However, Arnfield somehow links it all back to the creator of the initial doorbell, Joseph Henry. It just takes a whole lot of patience to arrive at that point, though.

The film causes unease not only through the images and narrative it tells, but also the audio. There are moments that sound like clanky pipes, crackly static, or people screaming. The imagery, coupled with the sound design, fosters feelings of paranoia. Maybe that’s the point, as the filmmaker argues these technologies aren’t helping us. Instead, they’re making us far more fearful.

Home Invasion is a timely, unsettling video essay. While it does take a bit long to arrive at some of its points, it does have a coherent thesis. Are all of those doorbells and cameras really making us safer, or is this another example of technological “progress” run amok?

7 Out of 10