After the brutal murder of her boyfriend, a young woman is stalked through the rural Oregon backwoods (played by locations in and around Bratislava) in The Strangers: Chapter 2, the middle entry in director Renny Harlin‘s trilogy that follows in the footsteps of Bryan Bertino‘s original 2008 chiller. After remaking that film scene-for-scene in his first outing, the stage was set for something new this time around—and well, that’s what we get here, for better and (mostly) worse.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 opens with a title scrawl informing us that 1,670 people were killed by random strangers in the United States in 2023, which sounds concerning until you realize that the other 20,000 or so people killed every year in the states are murdered by their family, friends, and neighbors. These films trade in the fear of the unknown, the masked strangers with axes that come knocking at our door… so why not pull back the mask, eh? Finally get to know these strangers once and for all.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Picking up directly after the events of The Strangers: Chapter 1—and following in the footsteps of Halloween II—this sequel picks up right where the first film left off, with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) in a small town hospital following the murder of her boyfriend. She’s interviewed about the nature of the attack by Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), who immediately feels a little off in his line of questioning, something that even Deputy Walters (Pedro Leandro) seems to pick up on.
Don’t get too comfortable. Not five minutes into this movie, the Strangers are back in action, murdering everyone in their path at the hospital in order to catch back up with Maya, for reasons unexplored. After an extended game of cat-and-mouse with the axe-wielding Scarecrow through the hospital and morgue, Maya finally manages to escape into the dark, rainy night.
She catches up with nurse Danica (Brooke Lena Johnson) and her friend Annie (Sara Freedland) on her way out—but wait, why did they lock the car door? Are they Strangers too? When they pick up roommates Gregory (Gabriel Basso) and Wayne (Milo Callaghan), the situation becomes too tense, and Maya grabs a knife and nopes out of the car and into the woods.
And suddenly, Maya becomes Rambo, stitching up her own wounds and battling the local wildlife in a scene borrowed from The Revenant. And the Strangers aren’t just mindless killers this time around: they’re also expert trackers, and manage to follow Maya’s every step through the night forest, conveniently killing multiple characters just seconds before they can assist her or deliver expository dialogue that would at least fill the audience in.
This movie has none of the dread of The Strangers: Chapter 1—which was largely confined to a single setting—and trades in unrelenting terror for more generic survival horror. But Petsch is engaging in the lead—even if the screenplay, by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, too often leaves Maya two steps behind the audience—and Harlin knows how to stage scenes of action and terror. For much of its first hour, The Strangers: Chapter 2 is tense and exciting, even if the story does little to attract our interest.
And then something strange happens. As one of the Strangers comes across the wild beast that Maya has slaughtered, we get… a flashback, from the perspective of a masked killer who we do not know the identity of, giving us backstory that this franchise has promised we would not get. It is the clunkiest of its type since the dog’s flashback in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II.
The actual content of the flashback is no better. Picture the scene: two young children chase piglets around a small enclosure. A girl rides up to them on a bicycle, and feigns injury in order to draw the attention of one of the children. The other child runs away crying into the woods, where they pick up a mouse and kill it. End flashback. Yes, we finally understand. This is why the Strangers kill random people, and yes, it makes perfect sense.
The film culminates with the shocking reveal of one of its masked killers—so shocking, that, wait… who is that? Be sure to stick around for the credits (after a trailer for The Strangers: Chapter 3) to understand who the killer was from clues in the cast list. Oh, it was them? That character that had maybe a single line of dialogue in the movie? Cool. Cool cool. Oh, what’s that? Another flashback to explain why the Strangers are killing people? *Chef’s kiss*
Despite general competence on the filmmaking level and some well-crafted set pieces, The Strangers: Chapter 2 collapses under the weight of some laughably bad narrative choices. Backstory we never asked for, nonsensical character motives, and absurd revelations drain the tension and turn what should have been a taut thriller into unintentional comedy. But don’t be a stranger: while the previous entry had little to distinguish it from the 2008 original, this one is really something else.
