The Strangers: Chapter 1
The veteran Hollywood director Renny Harlin turns to low-budget horror to exercise his creative muscles.
Just for the hell of it…
So, who are the strangers? Are they the loved-up Maya and Ryan who have rented the cabin in the woods – “in the middle of nowhere” – or are they the three strangers who try to break into the cabin to scare the living daylights out of them? It’s a pretty familiar set-up (cf. last year’s Knock at the Cabin), and the narrative here is gossamer-thin, but the veteran director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cutthroat Island) pretty much sustains the suspense for the film’s entire running time. It really is unpleasant stuff, but for audience members who crave a bit of nastiness at the multiplex, the film is a genuinely unnerving experience.
Why The Strangers works so well is due largely to the facial matter. For much of the time, Harlin trains his camera on the faces of his two leads (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) in extreme close-up, denying the viewer the comfort of establishing their bearings. However, the faces of the intruders are obscured by macabre masks, a sackcloth (think of Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow in The Dark Knight), a ‘doll-face’ and a ‘pin-up girl’, per the credits. They say nothing, slip in and out of the shadows without a sound and only really come alive behind an axe or a butcher’s knife. They are inexplicable and inscrutable and without apparent motive. And representing the unknown, they are far scarier than an assailant with a naked human face.
While supernatural forces can be dismissed as the stuff of fantastical hokum, bloodthirsty human beings do live among us. To thrust home the point, the film opens with a caption (following the inevitable prologue) informing us that 1.4 million violent crimes happen every year in the US, or every 26.3 seconds, while seven have been committed since we started watching the movie.
This tone borders on that of torture porn, a gratuitous desire to flip the collective stomach of the audience. Such was the relentless savagery of the original 2008 film (with Liv Tyler), that this reviewer can summon up its horrors with needle-sharp recall. For all the prequel’s technical mastery – the collusion of artful camerawork and score – there are just too many lapses in credibility (why would Maya, once alone, decide to take all her clothes off and have a shower after hearing ominous sounds upstairs? Why wouldn’t Ryan announce his welcome return knowing that there were strangers in them thar woods?).
Furthermore, Maya and Ryan are a rather milquetoast couple of cooing lovebirds, behaving as if they’re on their first dirty weekend rather than on a random romantic getaway. Maya has foregone her best friend’s wedding in Greece in favour of an unknown cabin in Oregon, far from the safe streets of New York. It’s a damn long way to go to get away from it all, particularly as they don’t even know the name of the local town (appropriately called Venus, pop. 468). But then the couple mumble so much at the outset, that some crucial exposition may have been misplaced. Be that as it may, advocates of the nastier end of the horror genre should feel happily rattled, even when the film ends with the legend “to be continued…”
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Ella Bruccoleri, Richard Brake, Ben Cartwright.
Dir Renny Harlin, Pro Courtney Solomon, Mark Canton, Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin, Alastair Birlingham and Charlie Dombek, Screenplay Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, Ph José David Montero, Pro Des Adrian Curelea, Ed Michelle Harrison, Music Justin Burnett and Òscar Senén, Costumes Oana Draghici, Sound Roland Heap and Simon Haupt, Dialect coach Gaye Brown and Liam French Robinson, Second Ass. Dir Luukas Harlin.
Lionsgate/Fifth Element Productions/Stream Media/Sherborne Media/LipSync-Lionsgate UK.
91 mins. Spain/USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 17 May 2024. Cert. 15.
