A trio of masked killers terrorizes a yuppie couple at a backwoods cabin in The Strangers: Chapter 1, the first of three new Strangers movies shot back-to-back by director Renny Harlin in Bratislava in 2022 that opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. Despite minimal bloodletting, this one is unrelentingly grim and entirely terrifying throughout, even if there’s a palpable lack of originality in the storytelling.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is essentially a remake of The Strangers, the 2008 film directed by Bryan Bertino, and hews so closely to the events of the original that it feels, at times, like a shot-for-shot retread. That’s strange given the minimalistic setup of the earlier film, but memorable scares and even lines of dialogue are lifted wholesale here.
In The Strangers: Chapter 1, the young couple are Maya (Riverdale‘s Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Cruel Summer‘s Froy Gutierrez), who get stranded in backwoods Venus, Oregon (nicely played by locations in rural Slovakia) when their car breaks down outside a local diner. The only hotel in town is closed for repairs, but wouldn’tcha know it, there’s isolated old hunting lodge out in them woods available through Airbnb.
The location itself is creepy enough, but things start to go south when a young girl appears at the front door out of nowhere to ask if Tamara’s home. Despite the unsettling vibes, Ryan bikes into town on a motorcycle to pick up dinner, leaving Maya to be stalked by an imposing figure wearing a scarecrow potato sack mask while she’s in the shower.
Story-wise, that’s really all The Strangers: Chapter 1 has to offer; throughout the second half of the film, Ryan and Maya are simply terrorized in and around the cabin by Scarecrow and two cohorts wearing doll masks. Like the 2008 movie, this is a grindhouse version of Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games, and audiences expecting multiplex-friendly horror in the vein of Night Swim or Imaginary are likely to leave it feeling queasy and unsettled. In other words, it works.
Because this one invites so much comparison, however, The Strangers: Chapter 1 can’t help but fall just a little short of the standard set by the original. That film had an almost oppressive sense of hopelessness; here, especially during climactic scenes, the characters seem to invite their fates through a series of bad decisions. Gutierrez and Petsch are fine in the central roles tasked with carrying the movie, but Scott Speedman and (especially) Liv Tyler brought a little more credibility to the characters.
There’s the threat of backstory here, with a range of side characters introduced in the early diner scene including a sheriff played by Richard Brake. But The Strangers: Chapter 1 keeps exposition as minimal as possible, and these films work precisely because we know so little about the killers: they serve as stand-ins for the audience, anonymous figures watching their victims suffer as a form of sick entertainment.
With Chapters 2 and 3 set to release as soon as later this year (official dates still TBA), however, that sense of anonymity feels in danger of being stripped away, and this Strangers doesn’t exactly leave us looking forward to the next entries in the series. A mid-credits sequence delivers one final scare, but doesn’t hint at the direction the upcoming two films are going to take.
Once an A-list Hollywood action director behind films like Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, Finnish filmmaker Harlin fell out of favor in the early 2000s and never recovered, delivering his own brand of anonymous content like the Pierce Brosnan-starring The Misfits in recent years. The Strangers: Chapter 1 is his best film in more than a decade, and proves he still has something to offer in the horror genre after earlier efforts in The Exorcist and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises and the found footage letdown Devil’s Pass.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 doesn’t deliver anything more than the 2008 movie (that will come in the sequels) but may win over those new to the franchise, and is proficient enough to satisfy undemanding audiences not looking for anything beyond a retread. But the stylish and underrated The Strangers: Prey at Night remains the best film in the series.
Trivia: The Strangers: Chapter 1 was filmed in Czech neighbor Slovakia, but the 2008 film also has a Czech connection: it was shot by Prague-born cinematographer Peter Sova, who also lensed Diner and Good Morning, Vietnam for director Barry Levinson.
2 Responses
Nice review. I liked Prey at Night better than the first film too, still looking forward to this one
I do not know what was the point of this movie? It is a scene-for-scene remake but with none of the tension of the original. Only the promise (or rather threat lol) of 2 sequels seems to justify its existence.