Review: The Strangers Chapter 2

Director:  Renny Harlin

Stars:  Madelaine Petsch, Richard Brake, Gabriel Basso

At the end of David Cronenberg’s Crash, James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) lay in the wreckage of yet another deliberate car accident between the lanes of motorway traffic, tangled in a sexual tryst. Catherine huskily longs, “Maybe the next one… maybe the next one…” implying the ultimate ecstasy of them both dying in a collision, finally achieving the cathartic and erotic bliss they so recklessly seek.

So it is for me – kinda, and far more wearily – returning to the cinema against all good sense on the off-chance that Renny Harlin and his team have course-corrected from the near total-failure exhibited in the first chapter in their unnecessary The Strangers reboot trilogy. 

Chapter 1 was an embarrassing waste of everybody’s time. Surely – and with the benefit of extensive re-shoots in the wake of that movie’s dire reception – this middle entry can’t be any worse? I vowed, at the time, to resist temptation. But that nagging refrain lingered in my mind. “Maybe the next one… maybe the next one…”.

Picking up exactly where we left off, sniveling survivor Maya (Madelaine Petsch) has been hospitalised from a nasty stab wound in her stomach. The one-horse Oregon town of Venus has a believably understaffed hospital on the night shift, but is equipped with a very generously sized morgue. In no time at all Maya finds herself back under threat from the sinister strangers, Scarecrow, Pin-Up Girl and the shit one (facts). For a commendably taught opening stretch, Harlin plays in the sandpit of Halloween II (either Rick Rosenthal’s or Rob Zombie’s) and the retooling of this drifting entity from home invasion horror to near wordless slasher works gangbusters. Even if it’s whittled down to its most basic drives, finally this series reboot feels as though it has purpose.

At its best Chapter 2 recalls the atmospheric and handsome economy exhibited in Johannes Roberts’ under-appreciated 2018 offering Prey at Night, switching out eerie fog for a rainy deluge as Maya limps out of the hospital and into the forest. In the review of Chapter 1 I complained that the brio of the movie exhibited no set pieces. That’s certainly not the case here, as mid-film Harlin and screenwriters Amber Loutfi, Alan Freeland and Alan R. Cohen throw in a digitally-realised wildcard. Before you can say “30 to 50 feral hogs” (anyone remember that?), Chapter 2 turns full survivalist horror and starts a full-throated Backcountry homage. It’s certainly memorable!

Petsch is more tolerable solo. Sorry to Froy Guttierez, but his blank himbo Ryan isn’t missed (though Maya sheds a tear or two), and Chapter 2 feels a renewed sense of focus stripping things down to, essentially, 90 minutes of chasing the Final Girl. One of the main irritants of Chapter 1 was the baffling incompetence exhibited by Maya. Granted, for continuity, that hasn’t gone away. She’s still shutting herself in dead-ends, discarding useful weapons and struggling deeply not to whimper. But where previously her ineptitude was frustrating, here her very slow grasp of basic survivalist tenants is oddly fascinating. It’s like watching the hominids at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey discover the concept of tools by casually flinging bones around. The dawning of fucking something. It’s about time, too, because Chapter 2 puts her through the wringer. She needs some skills.

Comparatively speaking then, yes, it is a heartening report, but there are still issues to contend with. An entire carload of characters appear out of nowhere and if we’ve been introduced to them before, it was either too poorly orchestrated or these actors were too anonymous to memorise because honestly who-the-fuck. However, the confusion created by them does help us empathise with the increasingly-paranoid Maya, and Harlin plays well with this opportunity for teased-out suspense. 

More ill-fitting are the flashbacks. Zeroing in solely on the origins of Pin-Up Girl, Chapter 2 tries earnestly to flesh out lore we don’t need, especially given the principals of Bryan Bertino’s original film; that it’s far scarier if you don’t know who these people are and that there’s really good reason for them to be harassing our leads. Giving them names and faces and backstories doesn’t exactly make them Strangers now, does it? And handing us trite childhood traumas about kicked-over sandcastles doesn’t particularly cut it. Do we need to know who the mythical ‘Tamara’ was that the Strangers use as pretext to knock on doors? And, if we did, is this the best that three writers could come up with??

Sigh.

But, the main positives still stand. This is a better, meaner, more efficient horror vehicle than its predecessor, and when it’s stripped down to the absolute fundamentals of the genre, Harlin shows that the machine itself is unstoppable. That leanness generates a palpable nastiness. Considering that expectations were in the toilet for this one, that amounts to a great comeback. I’m still not ready to say that this new trilogy has made a decent enough excuse for itself, but my interest level in seeing how this all ties off with the forthcoming Chapter 3 has made it out of the gutter.

Maybe the next one? Maybe, after all. And maybe – for decent stretches – this one, too.