THE STRANGERS has distilled the horror film down to its basest elements. It is nothing more than 90 minutes of watching a couple being stalked and assaulted in their house out in the deep dark piney woods. In this, it speaks to a deep-seated modern anxiety about not even home and hearth providing safety. Alas, it does so with no edge, no originality, no subtlety, and all the intelligence of a doggie squeak toy. Our couple is Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. Tyler is the star and it becomes apparent all too quickly that the flick’s entire effort is strictly limited to trading on her well-known name.
The opening shot shows two little boys arriving at the home after the carnage. There is blood. There is disorder. There is no mystery about what is going to unfold in the flashback and not even the sad little twists tossed in at the end mitigate that. The flashback is the couple, Kristen and James, arriving at the house in a distinctly unsettled mood. They have just broken up after he’s proposed. The romantic evening he planned is off. In the film’s only piquant touch, it is James who buries his sorrows in the quart of ice cream at the candlelit kitchen table, not Kristen. Soon the real reason for the film kicks in. A stranger appears at the door. Another appears at a window. A third is revealed lurking in the living room. They wear masks. They stand quietly while Kristen and James freak out and do silly things, such as leaving the relative safety of defensible positions in order to make mad dashes to cars that have been trashed and sheds that are about to be. The silliest move may be when James tells Kristen to put on some shoes, the better to negotiate running for her life, and she never does, even when the shoes are right there.
To her credit, Tyler does take her role seriously, screaming, moaning, trembling, and crawling with a sense of urgent terror. She, like the audience, is let down, though, by a predictable plot and a cynical denouement that reveals that the film’s sole intention was to start a franchise of sequels. The filmmakers have even come up with the equally cynical ploy of never showing the eponymous strangers’ faces to the audience, the women wear cutie-pie plastic masks, the man a shapeless sack, all the better to insure that the actors’ involved can be easily replaced should the franchise catch on and they should want something along the lines of a raise.
What we have here is ten minutes’ of plot stretched tortuously into a feature-length film. Like so much else going on here, it doesn’t work. Like so much else here, THE STRANGERS is crassness at its most overbearing.
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