The film is a psychological thriller about a middle-class woman torn between her love for her spouse and her ill ex-husband, both of them who were her childhood friends.

Luisa, a middle-class housewife living in Santander, Northern Spain, has a comfortable existence with her husband Ramiro, who has a successful medico-dental career.

One winter day, Luisa, stopping in a traffic light, spots her ex-husband, Ángel, who is selling tissues on the streets.

Overcome with sentimentality and, over Ramiro's objections, Luisa takes Ángel into her home in an effort to help him and rebuild the friendship the three of them once had.

He reappears after more than ten years of absence, broke and ill. Ángel still loves Luisa and has never overcome his feelings of resentment about their divorce.

When Ángel's condition worsens, he falls into a coma; Luisa, through force of will alone, brings him back to life to the astonishment of her husband and children.

Luisa and the children follow two funeral cars to the cemetery, with both coffins having the inscriptions written: to be reunited in the other world.

Vicente Aranda was filming El Amante Bilingüe when Pedro Costa suggested to him to make what would become Intruso.

After teaming in Amantes, director Vicente Aranda and star Victoria Abril reunited again in Intruso, their ninth collaboration.

Imanol Arias had worked with Vicente Aranda before in El Lute, a film that was an artistic and commercial success.

The role of the husband, after being declined by other actors, fell on Antonio Valero, who had worked with Vicente Aranda and Imanol Arias in El Lute.

Intruso forms with Amantes (1991) and Celos (1999) a trilogy of films about love as uncontrollable passion that ends tragically.

Aranda's direction is concise, its style austere, unadorned and atoned with the claustrophobic and dark atmosphere of the film.

The camera has a fondness for darkened bedrooms intense two- shots winter light according to the dark plot line.

Luisa's love for Ángel and Ramiro also resembles Catherine Earnshaw's split interest between Edgar Linton and Heathcliff.

The scene carries the classic violence of homosocial rivalry over into the arena of male rape, and yet it allows for a violent tenderness, not between Angel and Ramiro now, but between Ángel and what he has lost.

Ángel makes a triumphant, vehement, and sensuality charged confession to Ramiro on the way from the clinic on the day of the news, that he has slept with Luisa again.

Ramiro's reaction is a mixture of misplaced loyalty, emotional dysfunction, and self-interest, all conformed with the codes of male friendship.

Acting as he does, Ramiro's attitude bring upon him and his family the tragedy of the double murder, because he understands neither his wife nor the situation.

In the most impressive scene of the films, Luisa revived the comatose Ángel with sheer vital force, without any help, she drags him to the swimming pool, where she introduces his head in the water, which makes him react.

At the same time, she has to carry a weight superior to her own and in front of her husband and children, who are witness of the miracle of Ángel's resurrection.

Luisa very riotously exhorts Ángel to open his eyes and live in a monologue that is a beautiful declaration of love.