Movie: The Strangers: Chapter 1
Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Ryan Bown, Matus Lajcak, Rachel Shenton, Megan Suri, Gabriel Basso
Director: Renny Harlin
Rating: 2.5/5
Duration: 91 minutes
A reboot of Bryan Bertino’s Liv Tyler-starring ‘The Strangers’, a hit 2008 home invasion horror film featuring vicious strangers dressed as a scarecrow and enraged Betty Boops, this Chapter 1 is the first part of a planned franchise of 3 parts.
The opening sequence shows a man being followed and attacked by three masked men. From then on, the narrative follows a young Mayan couple (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutiérrez) who travel around the country. They discover that their GPS is not working properly, take a wrong turn, and quickly find themselves stranded in an off-the-beaten-path small town. In this film it’s Venus, Oregon, the residents seem excessively hostile and the couple is upset by the cold reception they receive there.
When they stop at a restaurant to eat, they meet some locals, including a sheriff (Richard Freno), the restaurant waitress, creepy mechanics who seem to have tinkered with their car, and very conservative townspeople who frown on them for not being married after five years of dating. Their car won’t start and they are told it will take a day to replace the part. Maya and Ryan are then directed to an AirBnB on the outskirts of town. Once installed in the AirBnB, things start to get murkier. Cell service is unstable and dark figures lurk in the woods. From then on, panic takes center stage as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who attack mercilessly and seemingly for no reason.
This first issue of Harlin’s new trilogy brings back masked assailants and brutal violence, but there’s no originality to cling to. The direction is quite lazy for a horror/suspense thriller. After the initial surprise, the narrative becomes lazy and the preparation is rather half-baked. Everything seems familiar to me. The problem is that we don’t get to know much about the protagonist couple or their attackers. So there is no attachment here at all. Writers Bryan Bertino, Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland fail to make the setup convincing or believable. From the beginning we realize that the couple is irresponsible and the people they meet do not like them. The decisions made by the couple when their lives are in danger also seem ridiculous. So, for the audience, there is no chance for empathy to be generated. It is difficult to care for someone we do not know beforehand.
There is not much subtlety and too many clichés in this narrative. Dramatic music, predictable scares, fog-shrouded forests, a few jump scares and nonsensical dialogue in a clunky script fail to make the scares count.
The premise is a trope in itself: city kids in a southern town full of suspicious, sinister locals from the Oregon woods who speak with southern accents. Several seemingly important plot points have nowhere to go. We are made to understand that Ryan needs the inhaler from him whenever he gets agitated, but there seems to be no such need once the bullying begins. The plot, plot and setting seem contrived and credibility becomes suspect. This is a soulless, paint-by-numbers imitation of the source material, with many unnecessary elements cropping up at odd moments to derail the tension and pacing. There’s not much of a story, the actors fail to make it count, and the boring ending tells you that the creators were more interested in expanding the universe than making this segment count. On its own, the film may be an acceptably benign horror, but as an homage to the original…? It just doesn’t work!