“The Strangers: Chapter Two” is (fleetingly delightful) dreck
Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland
Based on Characters by Bryan Bertino
Starring Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, and Ema Horvath
The Strangers, released in 2008, mined its horror from the randomness of its crime. It told a story where it didn’t matter how rich you were, how careful you were, how moral you were; death could be visited upon you as easily as it could anyone. While I find its portrayal of evil self-satisfied, I can respect it. Anyone who’s ever been home alone and heard a bump in the night knows the fear that someone will do awful things to you just because, and Bryan Bertino’s original film adapted that anxiety to the screen as well as it could. It’s a movie that’s unafraid to shirk genre conventions, even though conventions like “characters with interiority” exist for a reason. It’s trying to be about something.
The Strangers: Chapter Two is a movie that features a trained attack boar. The fourth in the series and the second in a self-contained trilogy, it was shot back-to-back with its predecessor and follows up that entry’s stale repetition of Bertino’s original work with a quick pivot into abject lunacy: a mid-film set piece where final girl Maya (Madelaine Petsch, Riverdale) is attacked by a trained boar. This isn’t the winking laziness of M3GAN 2.0. Instead, it’s a filmmaking team that’s desperate to extend their runtime committing to an idea so gloriously stupid it’s a legitimate miracle it made its way through the production process intact. Petsch seems painfully aware of its outlandishness, with a performance throughout best described as, “They showed me these script pages on the day.” It would play as pitch perfect black comedy if everything around it wasn’t so dully committed to a dark and gritty tone.
Elsewhere, things are less wonderful in its badness. I’ll admit that I didn’t hate The Strangers: Chapter One as much as many fans of the franchise, largely due to my disdain for Bertino’s “We don’t give our antagonists motivations. We’re so scary,” tryhard nonsense. Yes, revealing the identities of the killers was ill-advised and defeated the purpose of their anonymity in previous films, but that very purpose was dramatically inert in the first place. Still, it’s hard to see Chapter Two committing to that bit as anything other than a continued betrayal of the series’ ethos, especially after it was supposedly reshot due to Chapter One’s negative reception. It sacrifices the idea that these people could be anyone on the altar of telling you that Pin-Up Girl (Ema Horvath, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) became a serial killer because a girl at school knocked over her sandcastle once. Hurt people hurt people, you see. Who gives a shit?
Petsch does her best in the lead, but any work she does opposite other actors is undone by the unanimously abysmal performances of the supporting cast, whose baffling choices reveal a town seemingly incapable of a single normal interaction, like Twin Peaks as conceived by a moron. When the film tries to show that Maya’s paranoia is impeding her ability to trust even good faith actors, it falls apart even further, because nothing says “good faith actor” like a guy waggling his tongue at a woman like Oregon’s horniest idiot. Of particular note here is Gabriel Basso (The Night Agent) as Gregory, a character who adds so little to the plot that he’s difficult to describe but is nonetheless given second billing. He’s meant to be a red herring who Maya believes may be one of her masked attackers, but Basso overplays his character’s ambiguity so egregiously that it tips into hilarity, constantly looming over Maya while speaking his lines as sinisterly as possible and seemingly unable to close his damn mouth.
It's not completely worthless. An early scene follows Maya slowly exploring an abandoned hospital in a lingering long take that finds tension in the corners we can’t see and the ones we can that Maya can’t, though even that ends with a switcheroo so poorly blocked that the only explanation is that Maya gained the ability to teleport. From that point on, the film plays out as a ninety-minute chase with no clear sense of rising and falling action. It’s thuddingly repetitive and entertaining only in how exactly scenes mirror each other, down to two separate Good Samaritans being dispatched in identical ways. Characters are wounded then healed immediately lest the chase cease for even a moment. If the Strangers ever corner Maya, they will inexplicably walk away, and she will willingly walk into whatever trap they set. This happens so often that you begin to wonder if she is the rare protagonist to lack object permanence. The death march of slasher tropes is interrupted only briefly for boar-related reasons. By the time we reach the end, having hacked our way through extraneous plotlines and sequences that exist solely to pad things out to feature length, it’s impossible to greet the end with anything but a spirit of thanks that the ordeal’s over. Instead, we get a “To Be Continued” title card, one last twist of the knife.
Rating: D+
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer here.
