‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ Movie Review: No One Is Home In Slick But Generic Home-Invasion Reboot
Photo from Lionsgate
From Jeremy Kibler
By nature, all reboots are unnecessary. The idea of retooling 2008’s The Strangers, however, is not off the table when a random home invasion will always be scary. A consecutively shot trilogy, Fear Street and The Hobbit-style, is even exciting for a horror fan. The titular strangers may not need a reason to kill, but there better be a valid reason why director Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 exists and why we have two more chapters to go. Or, this is just another case of an over-ambitious franchise putting the cart before the horse.
As of now, the screenplay by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland is a beat-for-beat remake of Bryan Bertino’s original film, save for the most cosmetic changes and a little House of Wax thrown in for good measure. This time, the doomed couple is Maya (Madeleine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), two boring hotties who’ve been together for five years without a proposal. They’re on a road trip to Portland for Maya’s job, and these New Yorkers’ stop for a bite is at a diner in a dumpy Oregon town where the suspicious locals sneer at vegetarians and call an Airbnb an “Internet house.” You can just hear the record scratch in your head. Of course, the couple’s car won’t start, so they rent out a local hunter’s creaky but cozy cabin for the night. Tamara still isn’t home, but three masked killers are back to knocking on the door to terrorize and end Maya and Ryan.
There’s still a curiosity factor in seeing where this will lead for Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, but even as a standalone film, this is an underwhelming start. At best, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is competently made and functional as “Baby’s First Home-Invasion Movie” without ever being as effective as the dangerous, taut-as-a-rope original or 2018’s possibly-superior companion piece The Strangers: Prey At Night.
Almost every new variation on what came before is inferior. A vinyl record of Joanna Newsom’s folksy harp piece “Sprout and the Bean” plays again. “Hello” gets written all over a door. Even the killers’ enigmatic modus operandi is less impactful in its wording (“…because you’re here”). One of the victims-to-be is now asthmatic, and a makeshift inhaler is at least a clever tweak on that tired trope. The filmmakers do also try replicating that gasp-worthy image of the Man in the Mask (not being called “Scarecrow”) just standing in the background unnoticed by Liv Tyler; here, it involves a mirror and it’s still a pretty haunting image.
Director Harlin does admittedly get some traction out of the basic cat-and-mouse situation here and there, like a set-piece in a crawlspace and when Maya hides in a ravine in the woods. There’s not a lot going on with Maya and Ryan to make them the most root-worthy characters, but Madeleine Petsch, in particular, gives the slim part her all in terms of the emotional and physical demands. For the most part, however, this all feels generic and obligatory without much spontaneity or the same level of dread and fear as what has been achieved before. What is allegedly an account of “the most brutal” crime (as the film’s opening statistics state) is watered-down and not so brutal.
Creativity is mostly nil for this first chapter, but perhaps it’s all being saved for the next two (as well as Richard Brake, who gives a two-second cameo here as the town’s sheriff). Fingers crossed that this rebooted series is just leaving room for improvement and not going to completely misunderstand what made the first two movies so effective.
Rating: 2/5
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is currently in theaters.
