For decades, the slasher movie seemed to operate on a particular set of tropes, forged in the blood of countless teens who thought that getting high, drinking booze and fornication like rabbits in a remote location would be a great way to pass the time while a killer stalked them from shadows of a POV shot. However, in the wake of 9/11, movies tended to lean more on less obvious triggers for a hearty bout of mass murders as the world would come to starkly realise that sometimes bad things happen for reasons you simply can’t comprehend – “It’s the Millennium,” stated an oddly precognitive Randy Meeks in Scream, “Motives are incidental.”.
It’s with this in mind that we approach The Strangers, a slasher/home invasion movie that seems to spell this out as plainly as humanly possible; but while stripped back horror tends to be far scarier, does the movie manage to do a lot with incredibly little?
Unhappy couple James Hoyt and Kristen McKay return to his family’s summer home in a pensive mood. It seems that during the wedding party they were attending, James decided to pop the question only to find that his girlfriend thinks that she isn’t ready yet and an uncomfortable ride back to the house is made all the excruciating when they have to deal with all the decorating James has done.
However, dealing with rose petals everywhere and the odd bottle of champagne is going to eventually be the least of their worries, but before the ominous occurrences start happening, both James and Kristen have to deal with their whirling emotions as they wonder what this turn up for the books means for their future.
However, having any future at all seems to to be wishful thinking when a fateful knock graces their door at around four in the morning when a mysterious, shadowy woman calls asking for a Tamara despite no one of that name actually living there. Brushing it off as just a random bout of weirdness, James heads out looking to buy cigarettes, but during his absence, the girl returns and with her comes a night of utter chaos.
The girl is part of a trio of masked marauders who has targeted James and Kristen for a night of terror for reasons that seem utterly unimportant as they lay siege to the house. The male stranger (named in the credits as the Man In The Mask) breezes in and out of the house as he pleases while wielding and axe, while the two females, Dollface and Pin-Up Girl, stalk around the grounds with knives grasped in their hands and if James and Kristen ever want to give proposing a shot in the future, they’d better outwit their faceless, motiveless attackers post haste.
While I have no issue with The Strangers as a concept, or even the way it’s presented, there’s always been something of a stumbling block I’ve had with it since the day it first crept menacingly into cinemas that doesn’t actually seem ti be anyone’s fault. I call it the “Hunger Royale Problem”, due to a similar issue I have with my resistance to the Hunger Games franchise and how it’s a watered down and infinitely softer version of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royal. My point is why would I waste my time watching a sanitised version of something that already exists, when the earlier film has so much more to offer and while watching The Strangers, all I could think of is how much better, horrifying and challenging Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is in comparison. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was only one version of Funny Games either, but considering Haneke remade it in America in 2007, a mere one year before The Stangers took its bow, I just couldn’t manage to get it out of my mind. On the other hand, the tonally similar Eden Lake was release only a couple of months after The Strangers and still managed to be far more harrowing and affecting, therefore taking even more of the thunder from the film.
With all that being said, I don’t want to put it across that The Strangers is a poorly made, or bad acted movie – it isn’t – but for once it would have been nice for a stripped back thriller wasn’t quite so stripped back.
Still, director Bryan Bertino creates a nice mood full of soft browns and plenty of dark areas for a masked face to emerge and it gets some great mileage of having us, the audience, being clued in on the danger long before the victims are with missing phones and creepy shit going on in the background building the threat nicely. It’s also good that there’s some recognizable faces here as Liv Tyler isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to see in a film like this while Scott Speedman drops the brooding beefcake routine from Underworld to make both their characters horribly vunerable.
The villains are nicely cinematic with their individual masks and muddy motives preempting The Purge, but even though they are a supremely marketable bunch there’s a feeling that Bertino maybe hold back too much when it comes to detailing their murderous intent. While the prolonged stalking and cat and mouse stuff yields some choice moments (Glen Howerton’s well-meaning best friend creeping through an apparently empty house is perfectly timed and has a killer punchline), the film doesn’t tip over into the full on intensity of a full blown home invasion until the last fifteen or so minutes of the film, and while it does neatly sidestep becoming yet another instance of hollow torture porn, there’s a feeling that the film us constantly stuck in the preamble and never really gets a chance to rev its engine before the credits roll.
The legitimately chilling reason to why the group of Dollface, Pin-Up Girl and the Man in the Mask chose to terrorize and murder their victims is truly worth the wait (“Because you were home.”) and the final frames are great for that one, last jump scare, but The Strangers never quite manages to rise above the literal hundreds of movies that basically tell the same tale as its subtlety means it never picks up the momentum of its dumber, slasher cousins, nor can it match the stinging, red raw commentary of the smarter, more socially conscious home invasion crowd.
Slick, quick and to the point, The Strangers nevertheless remains a quiet, cold and oddly distant beast that, compared to others of it’s ilk, simply gets left out in the cold when its far nastier peers get invited in.
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