UK. 2022.
Crew
Director/Story – Babak Anvari, Screenplay – Babak Anvari & Namsi Khan, Story – Babak Anvari, Producer – Lucan Toh, Photography – Kit Fraser, Music – Isobel Waller-Bridge, Visual Effects – Misc Studio London (Supervisor – Mark Harris), NetFX Mumbai & Pink Snapper Ltd, Special Effects Supervisor – Patrick Thursby, Production Design – Ben Smith. Production Company – Two & Two Pictures.
Cast
Hugh Bonneville (Sir Hector Blake), Kelly MacDonald (Lizzie Nealey), George MacKay (Toby Nealey), Percelle Ascot (Jameel ‘Jay’ Agassi), Varada Sethu (Naserine ‘Naz’ Raheem), Franc Ashman (DS Ella Lloyd), Yazdan Qafouri (Omid), Antonio Aakeel (Faisal), Tarik Badwan (Said the Prisoner), Anthony Calf (Superintendent William Roy), Gabriel Bisset-Smith (Dave Colombo/Vlogger)
Plot
In London, best friends Toby Nealey and Jameel ‘Jay’ Agassi operate as a team where they break into the houses of prominent businesspeople and spray-paint the phrase ‘I Came By’ on their living room walls. Jay gets the security codes for the home of solicitor Sir Hector Blake but then announces to Toby that he wants to stop tagging because his girlfriend Naz is pregnant. Toby decides to do the mission on his own and enters Blake’s house only to go down into the basement and find that someone is imprisoned there. He tries to call the police but they do little because Blake is friends with the superintendent. Toby decides to return only to be captured by Blake. Toby’s mother, psychologist Lizzie Nealey, becomes concerned after his disappearance. After finding a letter with Blake’s address in Toby’s secret stash, she stakes out Blake’s house, determined to find the truth.
Babak Anvari is an Iranian-born filmmaker resident in the UK. He gained attention with his short film Two & Two (2011), which led to making the full-length Under the Shadow (2016), a fascinating horror film set during Iran’s Cultural Revolution. Anvari subsequently went on to direct the US-made Wounds (2019) and Hallow Road (2025), as well as to produce the horror anthology series Monsterland (2020) and the horror film Treat (2021) and History of Evil (2024). I Came By was Anvari’s third film as director.
The last few years have seen a surprising upturn in films on the theme of burglars or criminals on the run entering a house to find something far worse awaiting them. The first of these was Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991). The theme took off in a big way towards the end of the 2010s with the likes of Don’t Breathe (2016), Bad Samaritan (2018), Monster Party (2018), Villains (2019), The Owners (2020), Hounded (2022), The Price We Pay (2022) and Little Bone Lodge (2023).
I am not sure the reasons for the popularity of these house burglar horrors but it may well have something to do with the growing gaps between rich and poor – of the rule-breakers being championed as heroes who are exposing something disturbed or rotten behind the facades of the wealthy elites. You cannot help but feel that these political/class divisions, particularly ones that affect England, drive I Came By where the elite is represented by Hugh Bonneville as a top solicitor and graduate of a posh boarding school who seemingly chooses his victims from among immigrants and asylum seekers with the other side of the divide represented by the working class poor and said immigrants who are defying the system and highlighting corruption.
I Came By mixes the formula of these house burglar horrors up somewhat. Rather than burglars, the principal characters are graffiti artists making a social statement against the elites. All of these other films follow a simple pathway – they are about one or more persons who break in and become imprisoned. The first third of I Came By follows that pathway but then keeps switching point of view, following various other characters from Kelly MacDonald as George MacKay’s mother and Percelle Ascot as his best friend, to psycho Hugh Bonneville and the police who investigate the call-outs to his place.
I Came By whips back and forward between these points of view with quite an adeptness, producing a number of twists. It is particularly well served by its cast. At the forefront are known names like Kelly MacDonald and the rising George MacKay. The one who surprises is Hugh Bonneville, best known for a good many roles as a decent middle-class father figure in in particular Paddington (2014) and sequels and tv’s Downton Abbey (2010-5). Here he chooses to subvert the role and gives us an establishment figure who maintains a polished civility and reveals dangerous depths beneath, even if it is never fully made clear why he keeps people imprisoned in his basement.
Trailer here