Director: Renny Harlin
Writers: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
Stars: Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Richard Brake
Synopsis: After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple is forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive.
This year, audiences will be treated to two ambitious projects told in “chapters,” with Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga and Renny Harlin’s The Strangers Trilogy. Perhaps they’re not as ambitious as we think. Still, it takes guts for studio executives to greenlight a franchise of films when the reception can’t be gauged compared to the plethora of superhero movies that have (mostly) been winners for cinemas.
The Strangers is more of a niche property than Kevin Costner’s Western saga since none of the previous films from the franchise were particularly well received. Certainly not enough to warrant a trilogy of reboots/prequels shot back-to-back to pull back the curtain on the origins of the titular strangers. It did, however, develop a cult following, and part of the thrill of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 original and Johannes Roberts’ The Strangers: Prey at Night is that the antagonists have no motivations. They stalk and kill the people they find in houses simply because they were there. That makes it even more terrifying, even if both films are horrendously written and executed, teetering on the lines of exploitative rather than actually scary, regardless of their blunt – and sadly realistic – ending.
Harlin’s first chapter in his trilogy opens with a text stating that “seven violent crimes have happened since you started watching this movie,” and proceeds to…not follow through with this interesting mise-en-abyme by introducing two of the most listless characters in a modern horror movie this year, with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez). The two are traveling across the country and stop for a bite to eat. When Ryan attempts to start his car, it’s no longer working, with the not-so-friendly and incredibly suspicious mechanic telling them it’ll take a day to fix it.
The two rest up at an Airbnb, waiting for their car to be ready, and are immediately stalked by the trio of strangers known as Scarecrow (Matúš Lajčák), Dollface (Olivia Kreutzova), and Pin-Up Girl (Letizia Fabbri) as they break into their home and attempt to kill them. It’s a typical Strangers scenario without any of the aesthetic flair that made Roberts’ sequel somewhat fun to watch.
Harlin and cinematographer José David Montero shoot each ‘scare’ sequence, in which the strangers are in Maya’s house, with no proper blocking, with most of its visual cues seen coming a mile away (Ryan hears noises in the background, shotgun in hand, thinking it’s one of the strangers. The audience doesn’t see who’s making the noise, having constantly seen the strangers roam around Maya’s Airbnb throughout. Who do you think it is?). While Bertino unpredictably played with space in The Strangers, and Roberts used split diopters and crash zooms to exacerbate tension in Prey at Night unnaturally, there’s no formal exercise to be had here.
Rather, most of the core action set pieces are poorly shot and lit, with zero sense of tension in their depth of field or a willingness for Harlin to at least give his own cinematic language to the material. The Finnish genre filmmaker has never been this lazy, almost as if he’s contractually obligated to do this instead of wanting to bring his own flair to The Strangers, compared to when he succeeded at giving John McClane a fun sequel with Die Hard 2: Die Harder, or capture Sylvester Stallone in his most death-defying picture ever with Cliffhanger. We’re a long way off those two, or even The Long Kiss Goodnight, with a picture that’s never interested in its characters and aesthetic, which is likely what made the first two Strangers films gain a cult following.
But Harlin has never had the sauce with horror, having bastardized Paul Schrader’s Dominion with his reshot Exorcist: The Beginning and his follow-up, The Covenant, in 2006. Atmospheric horror does not equal action. It doesn’t have the same pace and energy as a Cliffhanger (or even a Cutthroat Island). In The Strangers: Chapter 1, the pace is all out of whack – most of the scenes are comprised of characters meandering around the Airbnb until a sudden jumpscare amps up the pace for just a minute before it dials down again in complete lethargy. Rinse and repeat until the joke of a cliffhanger ending, which gives audiences the promise of more, but how can you make three films out of such a paper-thin, lackadaisical script like this?
The thrill of The Strangers is the randomness of its antagonists, who don’t explain why they do what they do, and the protagonists are unfortunately caught in the middle of it. Had they been fully formed, perhaps it would have been somewhat better. However, the two protagonists we’re unfortunately stuck with continuously do the exact opposite of what they should be doing. You could practically hear me scream at the cinema screen (don’t worry, I was alone in the auditorium) going TELL HER TO PUT THE KNIFE DOWN IDIOT! as Ryan holds a shotgun on the head of Pin-Up Girl without telling her to put her large-ass knife down. What do you think is going to happen there? Jesus.
Or how about the scene in which they attempt to leave using the Airbnb owner’s truck but are being chased by Scarecrow’s own vehicle? Ryan and Maya literally STARE AT HIS TRUCK instead of, I dunno, moving out of the way? Even in such a situation like this, where you don’t have much time to think, you know that if a truck is coming straight at you, the survival reflex in your mind does not compel you to sit around and do nothing. What the hell is this? Do you seriously expect us to believe that the characters are this shortsighted and have no idea what to do when faced with such a situation?
No matter, we’re stuck with these people for over ninety minutes. After they inevitably discover exactly why their shortsighted decisions ultimately lead to a potential demise, the film ends and asks us to come back when Chapter 2 eventually releases, after a post-credits stinger that raises far more questions than answers. At this point, if I were reading a book, I’d throw it in the garbage bin before I’d even make it to Chapter 2. And that’s a promise.
