Review: The Strangers Chapter 1

Director: Renny Harlin

Stars: Matus Lajcak, Froy Gutierrez, Madelaine Petsch

Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion chiller The Strangers was typified by its mirthless minimalism, so it came as something of a surprise when a belated (and superior) follow-up – 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night – retooled the material into one of the most stylish and efficient slasher movies of recent years. That film marked out director, relative newcomer Johannes Roberts, as a genre filmmaker worth keeping track of. But this unlikely franchise now falls into the hands of veteran journeyman Renny Harlin, whose spotted past includes several humdrum horror cash-ins (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Exorcist: The Beginning); a jobbing resume with little passion on show.

The first in a mooted prequel trilogy (but set in the present day, so a reboot), The Strangers Chapter 1 teased an origin story for it’s three masked villains, itself something of a quandary as these movies, to date, have motored themselves on the premise of anonymous Americans who don’t need a motive to terrorise you. Both extant entries try to use their very leanness to their advantage, discarding narrative or reason and mining a basic premise for trimly focused suspense. Plot-heavy they are not. Three new entries suggested something ambitious in the offering. But, compared to Chapter 1, Bertino and Roberts’ efforts look like War and Peace.

As threatened in its call-back heavy trailer, The Strangers Chapter 1 is a scrapbook retelling of the basic moves already covered by the series’ first two instalments, only worse. This time out we’re in the company of Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), a couple five years into dating who have the chemistry of two actors who met on set that day. They’re on the last leg of a three-day road trip so Maya can attend a job interview in Portland, Oregon. Quickly finding themselves off the beaten track, they stop in a leafy rural town called Venus for food and some directions. Having met a roster of stereotypically unfriendly locals, our couple find their car won’t start and so are compelled to spend the night in a nearby Airbnb. Before you know it a small shadowy girl is knocking at the door to ask if Tamara’s home…

For something claiming to be the opening chapter of the story, this is not an origin piece. The titular Strangers are already established and as anonymous as ever. Pretty soon Scarecrow (Matus Lajcak), Pin-Up (Letizia Fabbri) and Dollface (Olivia Kreutzota) are lurking around the quaint forest property, although lit so poorly that – for a good portion of the running time – you’d be forgiven for thinking there were only two of them. Chapter 1 cleaves closer to the original than it’s follow-up, bedding down with it’s focal couple for an extended, humdrum game of cat and mouse.

The trouble is, Maya and Ryan are rotten company. Petsch’s Maya is one of the most aggravating offences against female agency in modern pop horror history; a snivelling, weak-willed and profoundly useless princess who smells a rat from their first encounters in the town, but then dallies and squirms about their situation whether Ryan is there to gaslight her or not. When left alone by him Chapter 1 wearily catalogues her succession of boneheaded choices, revealing a script that goes for any and every hoary trope it can manifest. Gutierrez’s Ryan is more generic and faceless than the film’s rural menaces, something Harlin makes abundantly clear by having him play directly down the lens as often as possible. There’s nothing to these two. Boilerplate doesn’t cover it.

But that lack of inspiration or ingenuity extends to every other aspect of Chapter 1. Imagine a script meeting between the three (!) credited creatives here. A blank piece of A4. Someone divides it into three sections and labels them “Arrival”, “Inside”, “Outside”. That’s about as far as that meeting apparently got. Granted, as covered, The Strangers has used minimalism to its advantage in the past. But in both prior cases it was so as to hone in on specific set-pieces and weaponise them for suspense and terror. No such set-pieces exist in Chapter 1. No new elements are added. Just callbacks and re-runs, only this time with the shittiest leads anyone could find.

Cataloguing the litany of eye-rolling crimes against common sense perpetrated by Maya and Ryan would bloat this sorry review to a length it doesn’t deserve. But let’s stop for a moment to awe at a frightened, vulnerable woman, left alone at a cabin in the woods, who decides to respond to actual threats of danger by taking off her pants, getting stoned, opening all the doors, and going for a shower. Maya; are you frightened, or are you not? The film itself can’t seem to decide.

I’m not someone who is often precious about logic in horror films. The genre itself is a place for nightmares and dream logic. Not everything has to make sense, and can be a lot scarier if it doesn’t. But the sheer laziness of this offering is downright contemptible. That it ends – very smugly – on a ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ card (and then has the gall to follow it up with a laughable post-credits sting) ultimately comes to feel like we’ve all been duped, and that those behind this movie have rested on their laurels, betting that it makes enough money to put two more instalments into theatres, leaving the real work til then.

Well, fool me once too often, because on the strength of this, I won’t be coming back and, if you have better common sense than I do, you won’t turn up to begin with. Chapter 1 is an uninspired and actually pointless piece of junk. Don’t buy into it. Don’t turn up. Don’t go near it.