“You know how they say the first kill’s the hardest? You’re my second.”
I enjoyed The Strangers (2008).
There was a lot to love about its cramped, underlit style, its lack of pretensions; the ambiguity and randomness of its violence, and the way it wore its influences – namely, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) – on its sleeve, while bringing its own stylistic originality to the table. While critics were ambivalent to the Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman-fronted film, it did well at the box office: netting more than $82 million against a $9 million budget. That was 16 years ago, and if there’s any trend that’s characterised Hollywood since the first iteration of The Strangers hit the screens, it’s that money talks and IP walks.
IP is like an old LEGO box: go rooting around in the box long enough, and you'll always find something. Whether that something is worth using, though, is another question entirely!
Meaning that the only real surprise when Renny Harlin announced not one, not two, but three remakes of The Strangers wasn’t that it was a trilogy, or that the films would be shot back-to-back, or even that they would be helmed by the hand behind Deep Blue Sea (1999), Cliffhanger (1993), and Die Hard 2 (1990) – it was that it took us so long to get it.
Yes, I loved The Strangers (2008). But this is a review of The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024).
The Strangers: Chapter 1 Review and Summary
The Strangers: Chapter 1 was released in May 2024 to an immediate slapdown from critics – and, unfortunately for the loveable Finnish director and the next two films he has in the works, I’m not here to contradict those critics. Sadly, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is a dull, drab, lifeless piece of cinema from beginning to end, with only the odd glimmer of the film it could have been. It’s the kind of film that was always going to have to struggle to justify its own existence – beyond the Almighty Dollar, that is – and, perhaps because of that, shrinks into itself. If you were expecting a fresh take on the original, a new direction for the franchise (which became that way with the release of 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night), or even a few moments in which the film would subvert expectations by riffing off of or departing from the 2008 movie’s key moments – you’re mistaken.
Cowed, maybe, by the task of relaunching a modest 85-minute film as a trilogy a decade and a half after the world moved on, Harlin and co deliver a meek, meagre contribution to the genre that, in all the axe-wielding and door-chopping, never seems to reflect on itself long enough to introspect, and ask that all-important question: “Do I really need to exist?”
"No, I don't!"
Leading the cast of The Strangers: Chapter 1 are Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez, who play a couple – Maya and Ryan – road-tripping it to Portland, Oregon for Maya’s job interview. Along the way, the pair stop for a meal at a diner in Venus – the site, we learn, that a man named Jeff Morell (who we saw followed, and ultimately killed off-screen, by masked strangers in the forest in a cold open; played by Ryan Bown) recently went missing.
Walking into the diner, they’re immediately met with a hostile hush – think the reception the American hikers of An American Werewolf in London (1981) are met with upon entering that pub in Yorkshire at the start of that film – and treated coldly throughout their meal. At this point, the film takes the opportunity to give us a look at several of the diner’s other denizens – including waitresses Shelly (Ema Horvath) and Carol (Janis Ahern), and a doting couple looking lovingly into one another’s eyes at the counter – no doubt several of whom we’ll be seeing again in parts two and three of this fledgling franchise.
The trope of the suspicious, sinister small-town folk is one The Strangers: Chapter 1 readily taps into, and it’s by no means the first (or the last) the film dishes up. There’s the near-miss crash serving as a grim portent of things to come; a car breaking down; the disbelieving boyfriend; antagonists whispering creepy lullabies at slowed-down speeds; warbly, old-timey music suddenly starting up, as if of its own accord, on antiquated record players; calls to 911 that connect, but break up and lose signal before the hero is able to give their name, or location, or indeed provide any useful information whatsoever about their attacker. Throw in a handful of window-smashing, door-chopping jump scares and you might as well bring your cookie-cutter slasher movie bingo card – it’d make one hell of a drinking game.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is more than happy to rest on the laurels of the original – and, indeed, on the shoulders of the well-trodden themes of the wider genre – for its scares.
After leaving the diner, Ryan and Maya find that their car won’t start. A few local mechanics offer to help out, but can’t have the job done until the following morning. The couple will have to spend the night nearby, and what better place to stay – says the kind waitress Shelly – than a local Airbnb run by a man named Joe. Ryan, to his credit, smells a rat (and oh my God, why wouldn’t you?!) but Maya overrules him, and the two take up in an isolated, in-no-way-not-uncreepy log cabin for the night. Anyone familiar with either of the previous editions of The Strangers franchise – or who’s even had a glance at the movie poster for this one – knows what’s coming next, which almost makes all this setup more interesting: especially given that there are two consecutive films to come. The locals’ disquieting mixture of apparently honest kindness and open hostility suggests that one or more of them may be involved in the horrors soon to take place, and give the film more of a sense of mystery and whodunnit than the original – which was more interested in the randomness of the violence, and its implications for society – ever offered in that department.
So, who are the strangers in The Strangers: Chapter 1? Find out at the end of this review.
In the meantime, a quick note on (what I’m positive is) one of the reasons The Strangers: Chapter 1 was reviewed so universally poorly. The characters! Ryan and Maya are both so earnest and well-meaning; so overly, nauseatingly lovey dovey with one another, while still managing to come across as snarky and elitist in their interactions with the small-town folk. Whereas the original The Strangers (2008) gave us a window into the murky, uncomfortable vagaries of a relationship on the rocks, this one is far too perfect. Heck, the only argument they have is based on Ryan having not proposed throughout the five years they’ve been together! When Ryan realises he’s left his inhaler in the car – and the car back at the garage – he decides to take a motorcycle (left conveniently, presumably, for the residents of the Airbnb) and head into town to grab it. As the audience, it’s a merciful move that at least relieves us of having to watch any more of the doe-eyed couple caressing each other on the couch and whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. Plus, Ryan’s exit gives us a 15-minute period of the film that is perhaps its most effective, as we see a masked figure watching Maya from the shadows, building suspense as she calls a friend; smokes a joint; has a shower. Back at the car, Ryan reclaims his retainer, but is confronted by the angry, crowbar-wielding mechanic Rudy (Ben Cartwright) before later managing to offend some more young locals when picking up a takeaway hamburger. It’s not clear whether Rudy is somehow in on the conspiracy involving the strangers – I’m guessing he is, given his involvement with the car breaking down – or whether he’ll turn out to be merely an unwilling participant, and prove himself later to be one of the ‘good guys’ by intervening in the strangers’ plans and perhaps getting himself killed in the process. Judging by this series' commitment to cliche so far, it’ll be one or the other.
The tension that aforementioned period (from around the 20- to 35-minute-mark of the film) manages to build comes to a head as the three Strangers – The Man With the Mask, Pin-Up Girl, and Dollface – invade the home and begin terrorising the young couple.
Hey, let's do a scene in which a character chops down a door with an axe! That's never been done before in a horror film, right? Right?!
I was surprised, looking at my watch, that the titular strangers were only introduced at the film’s halfway mark – and it was interesting that, for a film that’s ostensibly about people getting stalked by masked villains in isolated locations, it took the movie more than 45 minutes to provide that setup. But, I guess we had to have a scene with Ryan going into town to order fast food. Good! Characterisation!
From here, the rest of the film plays out as a cat-and-mouse game, with Ryan and Maya fighting to stay alive over the course of the night. Funnily enough – and perhaps this will prove significant in the film’s pair of sequels – the strangers seem to have some kind of connection to the cabin. They put records on; stand in the middle of the room looking around as though observing, remembering, reflecting on happy memories.
I wonder if this will prove to be the case, and if we’ll learn more. If so, it feels like a departure from the aforementioned randomness the original film hung its hat on – a randomness best epitomised by that movie’s most famous quote, when one of the victims asks the masked figures why they’re doing this and one of the antagonists replies, simply,
“Because you were home”.*
*Or, in this new, bastardised version of The Strangers, "because you were here."**
**Why would you bother changing that?!
Unsurprisingly, we get some very bad character decisions – at one point, Ryan literally has a gun to one of the masked strangers’ heads, and fails to pull the trigger; instead inviting his assailant to turn around, but never attempting to remove her mask and expose her identity – as well as some astonishingly ineffective jump scares.
Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) manages to make an appaling amount of poor decisions in The Stranger: Chapter 1 – even by slasher movie standards!
There’s some reasonably well-shot set pieces, but at times I found myself wishing – as half-hearted as it was – for the world-building and mystery the film’s first half-hour served up. As the night wears on on-screen (and off-screen, the audience’s patience wears out) the characters’ poor decision making and tired horror movie tropes wear thin. In one scene, for instance, Ryan not only falls while running away from the masked strangers and hurts his ankle, giving him a limp – he loses his inhaler, too. These kinds of events just seem like lazy writing; stuff added in service of the plot and to further tension, but ultimately serving only to sacrifice the believability of the action unfolding. What’s more, the fact that this film is the first in a planned trilogy also serves to undermine the stakes, somehow; we care less about the central characters’ lives because we’re sure we’ll see one – or perhaps even both, I won’t spoil it – again later in this ill-advised trilogy.
My face when somebody told me there were two more of these things.
Anyways, look – if you’re a die-hard slasher fan, you might find something to like with The Strangers: Chapter 1. (Even if that ‘something’ is having a laugh at the stupidity of the plot holes and insufferability of the smug, self-satisfied couple at the film’s centre.)
But ultimately, the film offers nothing new – not in the action it entertains, not in the violence it mostly skirts around, and not in its depiction of small towns that is at best unrealistic (and at worst, elitist). The fact that this so-called slasher opens with a lame cold open kill in which we’re not even shown the kill sets the tone, and ultimately tells you everything about the thin gruel the rest of the movie is planning to serve us.
“According to the FBI, there are an estimated 1.4 million violent crimes in America each year,” touts the opening titles of The Strangers: Chapter 1. “That’s one committed every 26.3 seconds. Seven since you’ve been watching this film.” Well, after plaguing audiences with an uninventive, uninspired, and unnecessary reboot of a superior film – and promising two more to boot – it’s clear The Strangers: Chapter 1 shares more in common with violent crime than it’s aware of. Both are brazen, barbaric assaults (be they on individuals or on audiences), and both – regardless of critics’ or law enforcement’s efforts to stamp them out – always manage to keep coming back again.
Who are the strangers in The Strangers: Chapter 1?
For my money, Shelly has got to be involved. Her desire to do Ryan and Maya a good deed in driving them to the Airbnb – and suggesting it before that – suggests she wanted them there.
So Shelly is connected, for sure, and I reckon she’s most likely behind the Dollface mask, too.
The other thing that seems clear is that the strangers are somehow tied into the very fabric of the town of Venus, Oregon – that there’s a cabal of powerful people involved in facilitating (or at least turning a blind eye to) the strangers’ misdeeds. While we don’t see much of him, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) was involved. And the fact that we get a scene with two young, uniformed Mormon-esque children, who ask Ryan and Maya if they are sinners – “aren’t we all?” Ryan quips back – strongly implies that the local church will have something to do with it. Plus, basically everyone in the diner is a suspect – and the loving couple at the diner’s counter, along with Shelly, fit the bill in terms of gender and, for me at least, seem the most likeliest trio of candidates at this stage.
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