Nobody stages a home invasion quite like Steven Soderbergh. For some of us, this much was apparent as early as “Out of Sight” (1998), when George Clooney stormed into a millionaire’s mansion in search of uncut gems. But Soderbergh has since become an ever more restless raider, and each break-in has reached new heights of formal and conceptual ingenuity; he elasticizes our understanding of genre even as he undermines our sense of stability. “Kimi” (2022), a neo-Hitchcockian thriller centered on an Alexa-esque virtual assistant, paid witty homage to two break-in classics—“Rear Window” (1954) and, bear with me, “Home Alone” (1990)—while suggesting that the most insidious intruder of all was the internet. In the supernatural chiller “Presence” (2025), the uninvited house guest was a ghost haunting a family; the camera suavely assumed the apparition’s perspective, erasing the boundaries between cinematic tricks and genuine miracles.

Soderbergh has become such a prolific, tirelessly resourceful, and altogether uncategorizable filmmaker that you have to wonder why the mechanics of the break-in still inspire him. His latest such exercise, “The Christophers,” may not fully answer that question, but it’s satisfying in every other respect. The home here is a ramshackle London town house where a famed painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), is spending his final years in a haze of creative stagnation and lingering renown. The invader is a skillful art restorer, Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who’s been hired by Julian’s greedy children, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning), to work, or pose, as their father’s new assistant. Lori’s true mission is to locate eight unfinished canvases—part of a celebrated series of portraits of Christopher, a former lover of Julian’s—and complete them in secret. When Julian dies, which his children hope will happen fairly soon, these never-before-seen Christophers will be discovered, hailed as his final works, and sold for potential millions. (Lori, they promise, will get a third of the proceeds.)

The script, by Ed Solomon, treats the Sklar siblings as cardboard grotesques—heartless, talentless, united in their loathing of a father who loathes them right back. Sallie’s own failed artistic career comes in for some nepo-baby knocks; we see her long-ago attempt to finish a Christopher, and it’s the most garishly incompetent touch-up job since roughly 2012, when a Spanish would-be restorer warped a fresco of Jesus into a meme for the ages. Lori, though, is no amateur. She’s a consummate technician and a lightning-quick study, with an innate intelligence that Coel—the extraordinary creative force behind the HBO series “I May Destroy You” (2020)—signals with a rapid yet cautious gait and a magnetic pensiveness that, even in moments of repose, causes her enormous dark eyes to pool with drama. Lori hesitates to take on a job that goes beyond restoration into outright forgery but eventually agrees, and not just because she needs the money. She and Julian briefly crossed art-world paths years before, under circumstances that he would scarcely remember but which left her with formative, humiliating scars. This is her chance at revenge.

Once Lori enters Julian’s home, the film springs to life. So does Soderbergh’s camera, which begins sniffing and roving about the space like a dog unleashed. Our curiosity is awakened by the meticulous clutter of Antonia Lowe’s production design—walls covered with framed portraits and newspapers, shelves of knickknacks, spatters of paint everywhere—and, most of all, by Julian himself. We find him in his studio, seated before a laptop rather than an easel; Julian, who hasn’t painted anything of note in three decades, now makes money recording personalized video messages for his fans. Solomon’s script shrewdly places both the artist and the con artist on commensurate footing: Lori, who operates a Chinese-takeout stand, is as dependent as Julian on an alternate source of income.

Not that Julian sees much kinship, initially, with his new assistant. Their first conversation is comically lopsided, and McKellen, purring his way through what is effectively a monologue, lays the groundwork for his most vividly inhabited and hilariously irascible performance in years. Physically frail, yet in full verbal command, Julian doesn’t talk to Lori so much as at her, pausing only to fire off questions that harden, in midair, into assumptions. He urges her not to blather about her artistic aspirations, if she has any, or to assail him with excessive compliments. (“I like my flattery. I just need to believe it,” he insists.) Lori listens in dumbfounded silence, keeping her eyes on the prize, and trying not to roll them when Julian makes a comment about the dearth of great women artists—the kind of remark that earned him a close brush with cancellation in the past. The next day, he greets Lori on the stairs, his bare torso jutting out of an open robe. When she asks him to cover up, he makes a crack about Harvey Weinstein, who “ruined the robe for the rest of us.”

McKellen has mentioned the robe-ruiner before. In 2017, after investigations into Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and assault ran in this magazine and the Times, the actor told an audience that “nothing but good can come out of these revelations”—though he drew criticism for stating, in the same sentence, that “some people, of course, get wrongly accused.” A Julian Sklar faux pas, avant la lettre? On a more recent, less anger-stirring note, McKellen has said that Weinstein had once apologized to him for his aggressive awards campaign on behalf of Roberto Benigni, which secured him the Best Actor Oscar for “Life Is Beautiful” (1998)—an honor that rightly should have gone to McKellen for his sublime performance, as the director James Whale, in “Gods and Monsters.”

Julian is, like McKellen’s version of Whale, a queer artist in the twilight of a major career, contemplating his legacy, mourning a lost lover, and striking up an unexpected cross-generational friendship. Whale lusts after a hunky gardener (Brendan Fraser) and persuades him to pose for a few sketches; Julian, though bisexual, expresses no such interest in Lori, and any art-making turns out to be a gratifyingly mutual endeavor. There are, naturally, layers of deception to scrape away first. Lori’s pauses reveal more about herself than she is aware, and her boss, for all his bloviating, turns out to be a surprisingly sharp listener.

Soderbergh extracts some fun from the ensuing cat-and-mouse logistics, from Lori’s meticulous duplication of the Christophers to Julian’s efforts to bluff her into admitting her true intentions. But the two are, inevitably and marvellously, kindred spirits, and it’s delightful when the tense, combative rhythm of McKellen and Coel’s dialogue suddenly takes a warmly contrapuntal turn. By the time Julian realizes what’s going on, he’s more impressed than outraged by Lori’s lies—and, if he chafes at the notion that she (or anyone) could so easily reproduce his painting style, his ego is disarmed by the pleasure of encountering, for the first time in years, an artistic and intellectual near-equal. Solomon gives Coel a bravura speech in which Lori precisely and unsparingly deconstructs the long arc of the Christophers project, treating Julian’s techniques and materials as a direct window into his ever-evolving emotions—even the ones he faked. Commenting on an ostensibly buoyant period, Lori declares, with devastating accuracy, “The lightness was forced, and the joy was a lie.”

Lori’s speech articulates the fundamental twinship of artists and critics—a reality that has always resisted attempts to drive a wedge between the two. “The Christophers” is a work of criticism that deftly distinguishes different approaches to criticism. A scathing essay that Lori wrote is shown to have more rigor and value than an old television show, “Art Fight,” that once featured Julian as a Simon Cowell-esque judge. Called on to evaluate an amateur artist’s work, he responded as though he were being paid by the unkind word. Julian ultimately musters kinder sentiments for Lori, urging her to apply her formidable imitative skills toward the discovery of her own voice—to put aside what she describes as “the art of . . . becoming someone else.”

These words are fascinating to consider in relation to Soderbergh, who has flitted among genres and subjects with a facility that is easily mistaken for dilettantism, or even ventriloquism. Yet, though he may appear to deal in familiar gestures, his quicksilver marriage of high-flying ideas and hands-on technique marks him as the opposite of a forger. He becomes someone else only to the degree that he employs pseudonyms: the cinematographer Peter Andrews, the editor Mary Ann Bernard. Otherwise, he is, as my colleague Richard Brody pointed out in 2022, “the most physical” of Hollywood filmmakers, “the one who comes the closest to the painterly ideal of touching the image.” I thought about that line throughout “The Christophers,” especially when McKellen’s Julian, his hands smeared with paint and glitter, attacks a canvas with renewed vigor, a sequence in which at least three levels of artistry can be savored: the character’s, the actor’s, and the filmmaker’s. The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in. ♦