When I started writing this review for The Strangers: Chapter 1, I originally wanted to try to avoid making too many comparisons to the original Strangers film and simply look at things on their own terms. However, this first installment in a standalone trilogy shot back-to-back borrows so liberally from the 2008 film that it’s truly impossible to stop making those comparisons. Even worse, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is so devoid of any sense of originality that, for the time being, it’s hard to see this “reimagining” as any less than a blatant cash grab.
Stop me if you’ve heard this setup before: Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) are a young, happy-go-lucky couple currently on a cross-country road trip, both to celebrate their 5-year anniversary and as part of their move to Portland, where Maya has just accepted a new job. What was meant to be a quick detour for food sends them to the small forest town of Venus, Oregon.
Sure enough, after their lunch, their car coincidentally breaks down, forcing the pair to stay overnight in an Airbnb miles away from town. Maya and Ryan make the best of their situation, cuddling up together and enjoying the peace and quiet until they hear a sudden knock at the door late in the night. We’re familiar with what happens next: the pair are then stalked, terrorized and hunted by a trio of masked killers determined to make sure they don’t make it through the night.
The main thing that makes The Strangers: Chapter 1 so frustrating is that it displays a nearly complete misunderstanding of what made The Strangers terrifying in the first place. Writer/director Bryan Bertino’s minimalist approach to the home invasion thriller is what made that creepiness in the original film stick. The movie taking place in a quiet suburb added to the feeling that this truly could happen to anyone at any time, which makes those moments like the iconic sequence where Liv Tyler is hanging out in her kitchen, completely unaware that one of the Strangers is standing in the room right behind her all the more effective. It made incredible use of negative space and a genuinely creepy atmosphere at a time when torture porn was the dominant style of horror.
“The main thing that makes The Strangers: Chapter 1 so frustrating is that it displays a nearly complete misunderstanding of what made The Strangers terrifying in the first place.”
The 2018 sequel The Strangers: Prey At Night (also co-written by Bertino) traded in the minimalism and suburban setting for a grungier, Carpenter-inspired aesthetic in an abandoned trailer park, but it still managed to succeed on its own terms with some solid craftsmanship and truly inspired sequences like the incredible pool fight halfway through the film. This time, Bertino only has a Story credit in The Strangers: Chapter 1, but that might be out of obligation due to how much the movie decides to copy the first movie nearly beat for beat outside of this new lame “cabin in the woods” setup.
From the moment Maya and Ryan arrive in Venus, the townspeople are immediately hostile to the couple. When Ryan asks for a vegetarian option at a local diner, the other customers look at him as if he had spit in all their plates at once. It tries to add a whodunit element to the show by hinting that some of them might be their future tormentors, but it comes across as yet another “backwoods town hates big city folk” trope we’ve seen dozens upon dozens of times before.
Funny enough, blatantly rehashing earlier, more successful works is nothing new for director Renny Harlin, who made his name doing the same thing in movies like Die Hard 2, Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and 12 Rounds (which isn’t a sequel but may as well be a wholesale copy of Die Hard With A Vengeance).
In addition, the marketing leads us to believe that over the course of this trilogy, we’ll finally learn the backstories of The Strangers, which, again, is a baffling decision that betrays what made the original effective to begin with. It’s a decision similar to Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake, where Zombie spent the first half of the film delving into Michael Myers’ backstory.
Just as Myers works best as simply an unstoppable manifestation of pure evil, The Strangers work best as just a trio of killers whom we know absolutely nothing about and choose their victims with no discernable rhyme or reason. It’s exemplified in the famous quote delivered by one of the killers: “Because you were home.” Removing that fear of the unknown for the sake of it kills the mystique, and the answer is never as interesting as the mystery, especially when that’s the main part of the gimmick.
…as it currently stands, The Strangers: Chapter 1 feels utterly pointless.”
It doesn’t help that these protagonists are about as generic as horror leads can be, though it’s not really the fault of Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez, who do the best they can with a bland script. A common criticism of the original’s protagonists is that we know very little about them throughout the movie. However, Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman’s couple on the rocks a few hours after a failed marriage proposal is at least a refreshing dynamic that adds to the tension long before the killers show up.
Instead, Maya and Ryan’s only real conflict is that…they’re still not married after five years together. That’s about it. Everything else about their personalities feels like any other teenager in any generic slasher. Even worse is when they make decisions that are obscenely stupid, even by horror character standards. There’s a moment later where they clearly have the upper hand and have one of the strangers at point-blank range with a shotgun but hesitate to fire long enough for another to get the jump on them. Why? Not out of fear or hesitation, but out of plot convenience.
Obviously, this is just one part of a bigger story, but as it currently stands, The Strangers: Chapter 1 feels utterly pointless. Sure, there are one or two decent jumps and some decent cinematography, but everything that this movie does, the original did better and scarier 16 years ago. The few things it tries to do differently are attempts to stretch out a story that didn’t need to be stretched at all. I’m hoping it’s just a baseline for the next chapter to go in a wildly different direction, but the film doesn’t even end on a note that excites you for the next one. If these Strangers knock at the door, I’ll just go straight to bed instead.
