Jonah Naplan June 20, 2024
“The Strangers: Chapter 1” is a horrible movie—so bad that you’ll want to immediately talk to someone afterwards about how unpleasant it is just to get its weight off your chest. When it’s not boring, it’s offensive, and when it’s not offensive, it’s boring. Rarely do I see a major Hollywood movie that can achieve this level of incompetence, but it’s possible that I’m about to see two more; “The Strangers: Chapter 1” is only the first film in a trilogy that will supposedly act as a prequel series to Bryan Bertino’s 2008 original “The Strangers”—which, all things considered, I don’t regard as a very good movie in the first place—the other two having been filmed concurrently with this one, as if director Renny Harlin thinks he’s Peter Jackson or something.
Granted, some could rightfully claim that it’s unsportsmanlike for me to preemptively penalize a franchise that has only reared 33.333…% of its head thus far, especially considering that this particular movie is basically just a worse, copy-and-paste version of the original, but my guess is that we still haven’t hit rock bottom quite yet (I’d argue that “The Strangers: Prey at Night” from 2018 is still more insufferable than this), and as the plots get more complicated and ambitious, likely moving beyond just a house, a trailer park, or a cabin in the woods, they’ll become more cluttered and inept. But we will see.
To that end, there’s not much to write home about here. “The Strangers: Chapter 1” follows Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), a young, blandly-written couple who are celebrating their five year anniversary on a road trip across the country. In classic horror movie fashion, they take a wrong turn and end up in Venus, Oregon, a sparsely populated town inhabited by a variety of shady caricatures who leer menacingly at the happy couple upon their arrival at the premises. After braving a meal at a diner, Maya and Ryan find that their car won’t start (now isn’t that a debilitating coincidence?), and learn, to their frustration, that the vehicle can’t be fixed until a specific part arrives. So they’re directed towards an AirBnB smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, without cell service or much of a lifeline to the outside world. Accepting the offer proves that these characters have never seen Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian,” and it’s the first of many dumb choices that they’ll make in this movie.
The couple will then proceed to go through all the same motions that Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman’s characters experienced in the first “Strangers,” between answering a knock at the door to find a creepy little girl asking for someone they don’t know (an event consistent throughout all the other franchise movies but not one that ever actually figures into the main plot), the male character briefly leaving the picture so that the female character can be properly spooked by strange noises around the house, and then the two of them working together to fight for their lives when a trio of murderous figures begin to hunt them.
The Man in the Mask, Pin-Up Girl, and Dollface have returned, and so has their ludicrous ability to seemingly disappear and reappear at will so that the film can demonstrate its cowardly tendency to barely have the victims and the aggressors even interact with each other until the very end. The filmmakers would tell you “that’s suspense!” but it’s not really. And it certainly isn’t suspense anymore by the time those fake-outs become five-to-ten-minute-long segments and any possible tension gets canceled out by sheer boredom and an urge to shout at the screen for something to actually happen.
Too often, “Chapter 1” succumbs to the horror cliché of having a vulnerable character walk around a house, flashlight in hand, as scary things jump out at them with a sudden, loud noise. Walk, jump, repeat. Walk, jump, repeat. But this technique is usually used in lieu of actual intrigue, as it is here, and the formula comes off as lazy, as it does here. With a story already this one-dimensional, it’s not even like “what’s” jumping out at our damsel in distress is even enough to make us cock an eyebrow, and the jumpscares lack the thinnest veneer of scrupulousness, making us wonder if Maya is merely jolting at the realization that there’s an audience of viewers sitting in their seats, watching her.
Both Maya and Ryan are interesting characters simply because of how uninteresting they are. The two speak to each other like robots. They make out in a way that feels mechanical. Their dialogue exchanges never feel like something one human would say to another. By that token, we shouldn’t really care whether they live or die by the time the story wraps up because we haven’t been taught to care about them or their relationship. Nothing in this screenplay by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland suggests that they have a life outside of this story. They may as well be A.I.-generated characters warped into our peripheral by whatever the newest algorithm is. Gutierrez seems to be channeling the same sort of performative tics that Speedman brought to the table during his turn as the supportive, upstanding, handsome husband sixteen years earlier, but without the necessary horror-movie-zeal that requires you to always be involved in the danger of a scene, whether that’s being focused on who’s chasing you, possessing you, or brandishing a knife in front of your face. There’s a brief moment where Ryan watches as Maya, in a slice of desperation, isn’t looking where she’s going and plunges her hand into an upturned nail, and Gutierrez has a delayed reaction, as if, perhaps, he forgot to act.
Petsch, on the other hand, clearly understands that she’s in a movie requiring a lot of screaming on her part and that largely derives its appeal from throwing a helpless young woman around just for the heck of it. And that, right there, is exactly what makes these films morally wrong. All three of “The Strangers” movies are about, most of all, needless, brutal violence, enacted by awful human beings who seemingly commit these ruthless acts just because they feel like it. And to me, it’s not funny or amusing. “The Strangers: Chapter 1” continues this tradition and it made me very mad. Not in the way that a great film can make you mad by depicting the real-life oppression of helpless people. But in an angry, offended sort of way that makes you want to yell at the studio executives who keep letting this sort of inhumane torture-porn be released into theaters for the consumption and entertainment of a crowd.
I believe there’s a huge difference between films like “The Strangers” franchise and then other slashers like “Scream” and the excellent “Thanksgiving” from last year, and it all draws back to intelligence. “The Strangers: Chapter 1” is not smart. It’s not clever. The violence doesn’t exist because it’s been earned or fits within a fun and welcome tone that the movie has set up for itself. It’s violence for the sake of violence. And it never once portrays itself as “only a movie” that implicitly lets the viewer know “it’s just an entertainment.” The attitude seems to be that the filmmakers are somehow “exposing” the audience to a show of violence that “must” be revealed in the name of making a big statement. It does so with a stupid straight face. It likes to think the audience will be satisfied by just watching brutality to no end, and that they’ll leave the theater unhinged on the idea that they want to see those despicable “strangers” pay the price in the next movie. But I’m thinking it’s possible they never will. It’s all a very disgusting form of “artistry” that gets tossed around shamelessly like fistfuls of confetti. And I firmly believe movies should not be made like that.
What’s worse, stabbing someone to death with a knife, or standing around acting like it’s no big deal?