Oh, The Strangers trilogy… What a strange, yet oddly ambitious idea it was to begin with, turning a wonderfully compact Bryan Bertino’s eponymous 2008 slasher into a three-part grand guignol – and what a remarkable mess it turned out to be.
The trailers for the supposedly final part of Renny Harlin’s horror saga attempt to hype it up as an epic conclusion to a large-scale, complex story, as if it were something of a 28 Years Later variety. In reality, The Strangers reboot has no scale at all, which becomes painfully obvious in Chapter 3, where the characters spend most of their time driving from one location to another, with some mild blood spilling in between. Also, there is a woodchipper.
To briefly recap the events of the previous episodes, err, films. In Chapter 1, a young couple, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), get to reenact the plot of Bertino’s film, as they are terrorized by three masked killers (Pin-Up Girl, Dollface, and Scarecrow) at a cabin in the woods. Only Maya lives to face the attackers another day, which she does in Chapter 2, spending that film hiding and running. The installment concludes with Pin-Up Girl being killed and unmasked, with some of the murderous trio’s backstory (including the origin of their, uhm, catchphrase about Tamara) also revealed in flashbacks.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 starts with yet another flashback, seemingly to cram in another kill and increase body count, but then picks up from where we left off. Maya runs some more, but ends up being captured by Dollface and Scarecrow, who now want her to join them in lieu of their dead friend. Meanwhile, the consistently creepy sheriff (Richard Brake) mulls over the options for covering up the surprisingly high murder rate in his town, and Maya’s sister Debbie (Rachel Shenton) arrives in town with her husband and a security detail.
All in all, this new and hopefully final installment is exactly what it sounds like: an entirely disjointed effort. Two previous films have always had a weak spot where the screenplay should’ve been, but at least in both those cases, the writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland were sticking to some sort of direction. Chapter 1 was a home invasion movie, while Chapter 2 leaned into survival horror, but it’s really hard to determine what this fresh hell is supposed to be.
We get more unnecessary flashbacks that overexplain the killers’ actions (spoiler: they are severely mentally unstable). Random people who aren’t real characters keep popping up on screen, just so the film has someone to continue killing off. Which is necessary, since Maya, who has been through several stabbings, a couple of car crashes, and was mauled by a wild boar in the previous film, has such solid plot armor that it’s no wonder the bad guys now want her on their team. The Avengers will probably call next.
Amazingly, the film refuses to be anything other than entirely serious and therefore never comes even remotely close to being pleasantly unhinged. Sure, there is a much-advertised woodchipper in play now, but still, instead of somewhat inventive kills, we get sequences like a prolonged discussion in a church about grief and, for some reason, Cain and Abel.
The main novelty revolves around the supposed psychological game between Maya and Scarecrow, who tries to convince her that they are alike. Which sounds potentially interesting and could’ve worked, if Scarecrow’s motivation was something other than replacing his girlfriend hours after her death (which, dude – gross), and if only the script bothered to give Maya some evident psychological traits to begin with.
Madelaine Petsch continues to carry the whole thing as best as she can, but by the third film, it is clear that she is forced to operate without any direction, both in the cinematic and literal sense. In the end, the authors also fail both her and us by sacrificing a chance of classic horror catharsis for a rather cheap shot at a more “emotionally complex” finale (someone should check if Harlin and Co. spent some time with the Duffer Brothers).
The good news is it’s finally over, but even that is up for debate (and the box office results). As we know, no one really dies for good in modern movies, except Uncle Ben, and that sadly includes unnecessary horror franchises.
The film opens today, only in movie theaters, via Lionsgate. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.