The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)
In 2008, Bryan Bertino, one of the most prominent and atmospherically masterful filmmakers working within the horror genre today, wrote and directed The Strangers, the greatest and most terrifying slasher film of the 2000s, an experience so traumatizing and grounded in the unpredictable laws of reality that it doesn't even feel like a slasher. Although the story is as basic and straightforward as can be -- a couple are terrorized in a summer home located conveniently in the middle of nowhere by a trio of masked, knife-wielding sadists -- it's the emphasis Bertino placed on the psychological anguish of his achingly relatable protagonists that marked his movie off from the abundance of other entries in the subgenre. The protagonists are sympathetic and intelligent, but not equipped to deal with such a nightmarish scenario that they did nothing to put themselves in, aside from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killers are ruthless and horrifying, but not possessed of superhuman strength or the contrived resilience to withstand bullet wounds in the fashion of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. And the ending certainly doesn't bow down to the demand of a Hollywood-style happy ending. In real life, sometimes evil triumphs over good, a disparaging point that Bertino drove home with the twisting, nauseating power of a knife to the gut.
A decade later, Bertino teamed up with Ben Ketai to draft a sequel that nobody needed, but with a stylish assist from director Johannes Roberts, the end result played like a serving of surprisingly satisfying leftovers, bringing an end to the titular trio's reign of unmotivated terror and closing the door on Bertino's spare story on a high note. In August 2022, producer Roy Lee announced a plan to relaunch what should never have become a franchise for The Strangers by filming three new movies back to back, the first of which would serve as a remake of Bertino's 2008 underrated masterpiece. Renny Harlin, known for directing A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, was brought on board as the director for all three installments, adapting a script by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland. Their stated intention was to reintroduce the story to modern audiences while expanding it in the form of a character study, exploring the insidious ways in which the trauma of surviving a violent assault and loss of a loved one can impact the psyche of a once-ordinary human being.
Admirable and ambitious as that may sound on paper, the result ranks among the most uninspired and pointless remakes in the history of horror cinema. The genius of The Strangers, aside from its intimate focus on the psychology and fear of its protagonists, is the self-containment of the story. Bertino used the simplest of ingredients -- an isolated setting, a pair of expressive actors, and three plainly creepy Halloween masks -- to craft a one-and-done story of the unpredictability and mercilessness of human horror. He didn't feel obligated to take it easy on his characters, he didn't comply with the slasher convention of dousing his audience in a river of viscera, he didn't supply a complicated backstory for his antagonists to shed light on their motivations, and he certainly didn't beg for a sequel or remake. But when an initially simple idea ignites the passion of horror-hungry audiences, and its influence reverberates 15 years later, dollar signs will flash in the eyes of the greedy and creatively starved, and such appears to be the case with Harlin and his duo of screenwriters.
Over the course of 52 days from September to November 2022, Harlin filmed all three installments consecutively in Bratislava, Slovakia, essentially one 280-hour slasher movie chopped up into three hour-and-a-half ones. In order to get to the larger story Cohen and Freedland supposedly have in store for us, it's necessary to revisit the simple home-invasion scenario envisioned by Bertino, and if this initial installment is any indication of the extent of their imaginations, the future for this trilogy looks as bleak and hopeless as the fates of all who come into contact with the strangers.
Boring, repetitive, and violently slow, The Strangers: Chapter 1 lazily retraces the most important beats of Bertino's original without understanding how to generate the nerve-shredding suspense or character empathy that made it equally terrifying and gut-wrenching in the first place.
Maya Lucas (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) are a young but still unwed couple celebrating their five-year anniversary on the third day of a three-day road trip from New York City to Portland, where Maya intends to interview for a job at an architectural firm. After returning from a bite at a diner in Venus, Oregon, the couple is flabbergasted to learn that Ryan's car is refusing to start. A mechanic named Rudy (Ben Cartwright) offers to fix it, but insists it won't be up and ready to go until the morning, necessitating Ryan and Maya to spend the night at an Airbnb cabin in the woods, to which they're driven by a seemingly friendly waitress named Shelly (Ema Horvath). What begins as a soothing, quiet escape from the hustle and bustle of city life quickly descends into a living nightmare as Ryan and Maya are visited and terrorized in the night by a trio of masked, silent assailants who have only one intention: to tenderize their targets until they're ready to move in for the kill, and one motive: because they're there to be terrorized.
Straight from the opening scene, the filmmakers lay bare their adherence to generic slasher tropes with a violent chase between the titular strangers and a random target named Jeff Morell (Ryan Bown). Why the victim is even given a name remains one of the more perplexing mysteries of Freedland and Cohen's shared screenplay, given that he serves no purpose to the plot beyond the filling the archetypal role of the opening victim. That's another motif that Bertino smartly sidestepped when crafting his original script, opting to put his audience on edge with a haunting flash-forward to create a mood of fatalistic dread before introducing us to his troubled protagonists. To the contrary, Cohen and Freedland feel it necessary to commence their remake by showing us the horror that awaits their protagonists via hacking off some nonentity.
In a foggy forest, Jeff, a strange man in a business suit, oddly enough, runs in a panic from an unseen threat, ultimately tripping down a hill and, in the one effectively painful detail, smashing his back against a rock on the tumble down. As he grovels on the ground, helpless and paralyzed with both pain and fear, the infamous masked fiends -- male leader Scarecrow (Matus Lajcak) and his female accomplices, Dollface (Olivia Kreutzova) and Pin-Up Girl (Letizia Fabbri) -- gather around him ritualistically, Scarecrow wielding an axe. Harlin presents the inevitable kill in the most disappointingly tame fashion imaginable. Scarecrow raises his axe in the air and, the second he swings it down, cinematographer Jose David Montero pans his camera to the left behind a tree to block the axe-to-flesh penetration, robbing himself the opportunity to satiate gore-hounds with a deliciously gory startling shot.
Whereas Kristen McKay and James Hoyt, the protagonists of Bertino's infinitely more original and emotionally resonant screenplay, were a long-term couple in the devastating process of terminating their relationship owing to Kristen's humiliating rejection of James' proposal, Maya and Ryan begin their journey at the complete opposite state in their relationship. A younger, happy couple celebrating their five-year anniversary, Maya and Ryan are still somehow in the throes of their honeymoon phase, blissfully in love and enjoying their third day of a three-day road trip across the country. The impetus for said road trip is a job interview at an architectural firm for Maya. However, following this reveal in a line of forced exposition, no mention is made of her talent for architecture. It's just an excuse to provide them with a reason for leaving the comfort and familiarity of their home city and putting themselves in the middle of the antagonists' hunting ground. Neither Maya nor Ryan is developed enough to kindle rooting interest in their fates. Each is granted a single trait in exchange for a fully dimensional personality: Maya is a vegetarian, manifested in her request for a bacon-free salad at Carol's Diner, and Ryan is an asthmatic, demonstrated by his sporadic use of an inhaler.
Together, they are neither the sharpest tools in the shed nor the dullest, landing somewhere in the middle of the smarter and dumbest protagonists in the slasher subgenre. An early indicator of their inconsistent intelligence level transpires during their introduction. While Ryan drives, he and Maya commit the cliche of playing tongue twister, nearly colliding with a motorist whose lane Ryan drifts into. After Ryan leaves his suddenly malfunctioning car in the company of mechanic Rudy, Maya leaves his inhaler inside, and Ryan conveniently doesn't think to check for it. Guess his sporadic asthma attacks fail to pose enough of an urgent threat to him. Moments after Dollface returns to the couple's cabin to repeat her infamous initiation question, "Is Tamara here?" and terrorize Maya by banging repeatedly on the door and remaining in front of the peephole, does Maya call the police and report her harassment? Why, of course not. Instead, the dumb redhead decides to calm her nerves via plopping on the couch, sipping a beer, and smoking a joint. Rather than changing into clothes like Kristen did once her sense of safety became dismantled, Maya wanders nonchalantly around the cabin in her underwear and post-coital blue blouse, playing Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. If you were alone in an unfamiliar cabin in the middle of nowhere and felt you were being stalked and harassed, would you want to create that kind of resonant noise? Even if you possessed the musical talent to do so? Then, like Carla Moran in The Entity after being assaulted twice by her invisible rapists, Maya actually feels comfortable enough to strip off her already minimal clothing and take a shower.
Remember Sidney Prescott's ironically funny takedown of female slasher-movie characters in Scream? "Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act who's always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting." Apart from the acting criticism, that describes Maya to a tee at one point. When the light of her cellphone shines on Dollface, who's standing in front of her in the dark, Maya screams and runs upstairs instead of out the front door. Even more incredulously, she actually believes Ryan's theory that all she must have seen was the painting of a clown's face on the wall, her paranoia exacerbated by the darkness, unfamiliar location, and strong weed.
By far the most boneheaded decision is made by Ryan in his second to last scene. While searching for Maya in the woods, he actually gains the upper hand over Pin-Up Girl, sneaking up behind her and aiming a shotgun at the back of her head. After turning around, she literally defies him to pull the trigger, screaming crazily and laughing tauntingly, wrapping her hands around the barrel and pulling it toward her masked face. With the life of this killer firmly in his hands, Ryan inexplicably hesitates, says the dumbest line in the script, "Give me one fucking good reason not to fucking kill you right now!" and creepily brags about having killed the homeowner of his and Maya's cabin, granting Scarecrow more than enough time to show up and knock this idiot out cold with the knob of his axe. Ryan personifies the proverb, "He who hesitates is lost." Even before this, Ryan thinks it wise to scream Maya's name as he runs through the woods, as though putting himself in the killers' hunting ground isn't dangerous enough. In the smartest decision conceived for either of the couple, Maya lies down and buries herself in branches and leaves to blend in with the woods, calling the police and whispering her location as quietly as possible.
From an acting standpoint, divorced from the myriad dunderheaded decisions their characters commit, Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez are no match for the emotional intensity of Liv Tyler or Scott Speedman, but they exhibit a tender, warm, lived-in chemistry with one another. Neither actor has anything to personally be ashamed of, aside from signing up for this remake in the first place. Both are undeniably attractive, blessed with the Hollywood good looks of Ken and Barbie. From the moment we meet the poetically named Ryan and Maya, who combine to create "Mayan," it's evident that they've been together for five years and are cruising along the path to an engagement. Whether they're sitting across from each other in a diner or snuggling in each other's arms, Gutierrez and Petsch make it easy to believe in the Mayan relationship, the love emanating from their eyes as they stare deeply into each other's.
Both immerse themselves body and soul in the physical and emotional anguish of their characters' ordeal. In the original Strangers, Liv Tyler delivered the greatest screaming performance this side of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Petsch cannot hope to possibly come within an inch of her physicality, her scream much quieter and less convincing. Nevertheless, she does a great job at handling the crying, of which Maya is required to do a lot in the script. Nowhere is this more upsetting than in the final scene shared by Petsch and Gutierrez. Realizing they've been captured, with chances for rescue or survival slim to none, Petsch pours her heart out, quivering her deep red lips as a river of tears cascades down her cheeks, widening her lips into a weak smile of wishful thinking before overwhelming hopelessness fully sets in. With their hands tied, the onscreen lovers lean over to rest their foreheads against each other poignantly. It's a shame the strength of their committed performances is undercut by such unengaging, vanilla protagonists. As for Olivia Kreutzova, her voice lacks the sensuousness and sinister undertone that Gemma Ward brought to the role of Dollface, making her delivery of her signature line sound like that of any ordinary young woman.
For their buildup to their protagonists' nighttime assault, Harlin and his writers lean too heavily on the tired trope of "big-city outsiders stranded in a small town." In the original, Kristen and James were on the verge of a breakup. When we first met them, they were sitting in a still car, their tear-stained faces illuminated by the flashing green and red of a traffic light. Not a word passed between them. It was clear in their silence that had just gone through, and were in the middle of going through, a traumatic ordeal. This was a brilliant way to draw the viewer into the psyches of these people. What happened to them? Why aren't they speaking? Even before the titular maniacs made their first knock on the door, the emotional state of both characters was profoundly disturbed. In Freedland and Cohen's remake, Maya and Ryan begin at their happiest, entirely drama-free and basking in the magic of young love. Realizing how radically this relational shift dilutes the psychological tension of Bertino's movie, the writers scramble to find another method for pulling the viewer to the edge of their seat. The solution they conceive is pathetic and derivative.
The whole point of The Strangers is that that's exactly what the killers and victims are to each other: strangers. Kristen and James didn't know the people targeting them, and the killers had no personal beef with their targets. As Dollface bluntly explained with the utmost bone-chilling efficiency when asked by Kristen why they were doing this, "Because you were home." Kristen and James could have been anybody of any gender or age. Only because they happened to be in the same vicinity at the same time as these equal-opportunity sadists were they selected for psychological torment and ultimately a torturous stabbing death. In The Strangers: Chapter 1, the filmmakers misguidedly attempt to broaden the small-scale story into a town-wide conspiracy, where not only could anyone be the titular murderers, but everyone appears to be complicit in their crimes. A choice that not only lessens the realism, but evokes the feel of a standard-issue slasher flick, which Bertino's version worked diligently to subvert.
In an attempt to generate tension through the hostile behavior of the locals, the filmmakers stab themselves in the gut by painting them as the most stereotypically unkempt, cartoonishly creepy rednecks who make no effort at concealing their ill-defined contempt for outsiders. Richard Brake, the go-to actor for the most sadistic villains in modern horror, makes a cameo as a sheriff who glances at Ryan and Maya when they enter Carol's Diner. This is how you can tell The Strangers: Chapter 1 isn't a complete movie. In no universe would Brake appear in a horror movie and not be complicit in some way. The two Mormon boys from the ending of the original Strangers are reintegrated clumsily here, fulfilling the identical function of handing out religious tracts and asking those they hand them to if they're sinners. Where Bertino's boys were straight-faced but relatively normal-looking, Harlin's are forced to wear hangdog expressions to engender an air of artificial awkwardness.
Ben Cartwright gives the most embarrassingly unsubtle performance as Rudy the mechanic. For his introduction, Harlin deploys Rudy as a failed attempt at a false jump scare, placing him in front of Ryan's driver-side window. Cartwright is handed one note to play for his few scenes, and he plays it in the form of overtly murderous glares that are so contrived, self-serious, and desperately antagonistic as to make it obvious that he's not the lead killer. Shelly the waitress subtly mocks Maya for her vegetarianism, and Annie the chef chastises Ryan for not yet proposing to Maya, halfheartedly suggesting a town full of pretentious Christian conservatives who punish hedonists that engage in premarital sex.
The best compliment I can give to The Strangers: Chapter 1 is that it's stylishly shot by Jose David Montero, whose professional camerawork accentuates the austere beauty and nightmarish isolation of the Oregon forest in which most of the remake transpires. The primary setting is a horror trope that never seems to get old: a cabin in the middle of the woods. It lacks the personality of James Hoyt's summer home, with a broken fridge and multiple lights attached to the exterior. From the opening title card, Montero's aerial shots glide over green, leafy trees. Streaks of blue mist penetrate the blackness of the forest, illuminating the characters within. As the trio of killers pursues their latest targets in the nighttime woods, Montero frames them in low-angle shots to emphasize their position of authority, surrounded by towering, thin, bare trees.
On the downside, Montero overdoses on establishing shots of the simultaneously peaceful and ominous Airbnb cabin, along with static shots of the woods which symbolize the repetitive emptiness of the Alans' plot. Despite the predictability of the initial knock on the door, telegraphed by Maya and Ryan's foreplay on the kitchen sink, Montero uses this moment to execute one of his more inventive moves, panning left to a close-up of the latch vibrating aggressively in accompaniment to the knock. Similar to Rick Rosenthal's treatment of Michael Myers in Halloween 2, Montero reduces suspense by periodically switching to the perspectives of his masked intruders, in contrast to Bertino, who kept his audience locked in the increasingly paranoid mindset of Kristen, forcing us to share in her terror, limiting our vision and hearing to mostly what she could see and hear. We weren't permitted to know where the strangers were. They could be anywhere at any time. That engineered a suffocating atmosphere of claustrophobia. By showing us where the strangers are, Harlin emasculates their ability to surprise.
A series of close-ups of blood droplets dripping onto a French fry container and napkins cleverly resembles the ketchup spilling out of Ryan's cheeseburger. Montero knows his way around a clever angle, placing his camera behind an upper stair railing, looking down at Maya as she ignorantly plays "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano. He pulls back from Maya for an over-the-shoulder shot of Scarecrow, whose reflection in a mirror above the piano reveals him watching her in a rocking chair. Montero cuts to a close-up of Maya's face, and when he returns to the previous shot, the chair is predictably empty. Harlin lacks Bertino's talent for voyeuristic neutral shots. Take the scene where Maya is in the shower, already spoiled in the trailer. As she steps out of the center of the frame to move closer to the showerhead, Scarecrow is shown to be standing still from behind the glass door, his presence punctuated by a scare chord. Maya steps back into the center, blocking Scarecrow from the frame, and when she turns her head toward the door, her stalker has once again seamlessly disappeared within a few seconds. The essence of these marauders is that they're flesh-and-blood human beings who represent the sadism and mercilessness that exists in some of those who walk among us every day. Harlin and Montero's technique portrays them more like specters who can slink in and out of scenes at will, always able to evade peripheral vision or refrain from making the slightest creak.
During the course of The Strangers: Chapter 1's 91-minute runtime, Harlin manages to direct two moderately effective sequences. The first occurs when Maya stabs her hand through a nail while crawling away in a crawl space with Ryan. You can feel her agony as she strains to suppress her screams, although even this moment, while squirm-inducing at first, can't help recalling Emily Blunt's far more visceral nail-in-foot set piece from A Quiet Place. Maya's ability to restrain herself is less credible, but provokes momentary shock nonetheless. In the second, Maya has buried herself under sticks and leaves, and looks up to see Dollface standing atop a hill above her. Editor Michelle Harrison cuts back and forth between Maya's terrified face and her pursuer's searching mask, transferring Maya's uncertainty as to whether Dollface has spotted her. When it becomes clear that she has, staring directly at her, Harlin finally summons a glimmer of suspense. Can Dollface see her? Okay, now she definitely can. What will she do next? Jump down, or keep Maya locked in paralyzed anxiety?
Once Ryan and Maya escape their cabin, Harlin carries out the remainder of their ordeal at a plodding pace. While James and Kristen had the survival instinct to attempt a counterattack and run to a shed to call for help on a radio, Maya and Ryan spend the majority of the story running and hiding aimlessly in the forest, a shed, the crawlspace, and slinking stealthily around the outside of the cabin. This movie crawls to its inevitable, fatalistic conclusion. It feels a lot longer than 91 minutes. Despite narrowing its focus to its two protagonists, the movie fails to build momentum. Harlin's direction is so slow that it numbs us to Ryan and Maya's fates and stirs impatience for their capture.
In the most gutting quirk of fate in Bertino's movie, James accidentally shot his best friend, Mike, in the head under the assumption he was the Man in the Mask. Feeling beholden to retrace every meaningful beat in his screenplay, the Alans manufacture a character to perform the same function. This turns out to be Joe the homeowner, whose demise is as predictable as it is emotionally flat. What made Mike's death so heart-wrenching was his relationship to his shooter. James was his best friend, and Mike was loyal enough to drive out to his vacation home early in the morning, slightly intoxicated, no less, to drive James home and comfort him in his time of disappointment and humiliation. Now, in addition to having to figure out a way to evade the strangers and survive the night with Kristen, James is racked with the permanent psychological scar of crushing guilt. That added resonance to the bloodshed.
Joe's death, on the other hand, lacks any shred of genuine tragedy. Sure, he was an innocent human being whose fatal mistake was appearing on his own doorstep at precisely the wrong time, but to Maya and Ryan, he was a total stranger whom they never even met. By extension, that's exactly what he was to us as well. Then, as the couple sits down and tearfully processes Ryan's mistake, Maya disgustingly absolves Ryan of any accountability, chalking his mistake up to his masculine impulse to protect them. This renders the entire development as pointless, unmoving, and merely formulaic, born from a slavish devotion to the 2008 source material.
Costume designer Oana Draghici faithfully recreates the masks of the strangers, three of the simplest and most iconic in modern horror, for the most part. The most significant change is applied to the women in the form of black beanies, which are more masculine and less scary than the long blond and brunette hair that was allowed to flow from the masks worn by Gemma Ward and Laura Margolis. Having been renamed from the admittedly unimaginative "Man in the Mask" to the simpler one-worded "Scarecrow," the male leader of the trio is given a burlap sack mask that resembles his namesake, beige and slightly tattered, lacking the stark whiteness that made Kip Weeks' pillowcase mask pop with the blackness of negative space.
Bryan Bertino's ending to The Strangers remains one of the most harrowing ever conceived for a horror movie. After mustering up all the strength they could to survive the night, Kristen and James are rendered unconscious, bound beside each other to chairs, permitted one last moment to profess their love for each other, and stabbed to death, their cries for mercy falling on deaf ears. Freedland and Cohen essentially rewrite the same ending, staged in a practically identical manner by Harlin, adding only three differences which contribute nothing of value. Dollface's infamous motivational reply is spoken by Pin-Up Girl, reworded in a way that matches the meaning of Ward's line without its cleverness or memorability. Instead of saying "Because you were home," her line is trimmed to "Because you're here." It just doesn't have the same chilling ring to it. Like everything else in this remake, it's lazier and more generic than what came before.
Once the deed is done, the Alans spoil the ending with one of the most annoying cliches: the sound of police sirens in the distance. Now that the story is over and the protagonists have been either killed or seriously injured, the police finally arrive. It's a dated insult to the dedication of police. In place of the expertly timed jump scare that capped off Bertino's bleaker version is the reveal that Maya has survived. Unfortunately, the filmmakers have already preordained her fate by openly promoting their remake as the first part of a trilogy revolving around Maya's character development, thereby eliminating any chance at surprise or relief. It's literally right there in the title: Chapter 1. According to its Wikipedia page, in the final shot, Scarecrow is lying next to Maya in her hospital bed. If that's true, this shot must have been poorly filmed because I was scanning the screen for ominous details and came up empty-handed. Also, if he's really there, why wouldn't he take the opportunity to finish her off?
Horror remakes come in all different shapes and sizes. The best ones use their source material as a jumping-off point for a radically different interpretation that pays homage to the story that birthed it while updating it for a modern audience. The good ones adhere generally to the outline set forth by their predecessor while adding just enough changes to distinguish themselves and keep from registering as a complete rehash. And the worst ones mindlessly imitate nearly every aspect of their inspiration in the cynical pursuit of cashing in on a brand-name property guaranteed to rake in a surplus of moolah. In the catalogue of horror remakes, The Strangers: Chapter 1 falls squarely in the latter category, ranking dismally alongside Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Kimberly Peirce's Carrie as another remake as inessential as it is unoriginal, uneventful, and, most egregiously of all, disrespectful. The most distressing scare provided by this godforsaken excuse for a horror film is the promise of two follow-ups to complete the story.
3.5/10
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