The Strangers Movie Review

Written and directed by Bryan Bertino the new psychological thriller The Strangers

stars Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman in an intense drama based on true events.

Kristen McKay (Tyler) and James Hoyt (Speedman) have had a bad night. First Kristen doesn’t accept James’ marriage proposal, then back in their love nest, the couple must spend what should have been a romantic evening, bitterly eyeing each other across a romantic table, drinking celebratory champagne.

They argue and fingerpoint, but then lip lock. Just when things begin to heat up and make-up sex seems inevitable, a knock comes at the door. It’s after 4 in the morning and they don’t know anyone around.

The Strangers at the Door

Opening the door, a bizarre girl asks for Tamera. Startled, Kristen and James, in clipped dialogue swallowing fear, tell her that no one at this address goes by Tamera. The strange girl leaves, is swallowed by the night and the couple revert to two people on the edge of a painful breakup.

Little do they know that the tension in their home would be the least of their worries that night. Later the couple becomes terrorized in their own home by three masked figures for apparently no reason.

The Strangers closely follows the idea of being terrorized in your own home seen earlier this year in Funny Games, except that in that movie the audience sees the torturers’ faces and understands to some degree the motives behind such brutal and inhumane acts. In The Strangers, the only motive behind the torture is that the people “were home”.

Masked Strangers Watching from the Inside

Detached and cold, the killers play a haunting game of cat and mouse for the most part of this movie. In no way can it be considered a simple slasher movie since the gore factor is kept to a minimum. Instead the creep factor is augmented to extreme proportions; a masked figure watching from inside the house, slightly moved objects, a burning cell phone in the fireplace. The fact that the killers watch their prey from behind goofy children’s masks make them all the more sinister.

But what this movie lacks is fear. In just one and a half hours the movie shows the complete undoing of a couple at the hands of strangers, but an awful lot of time gets devoted to the couple themselves and their troubled relationship. Unfortunately an indescribable feeling of déjà vu instills quickly during the viewing of this film. When a character opens a door or a window, the inevitable stranger in the night wearing a creepy mask pops up with horror-by-numbers predictability.

Despite its apparent flaws, The Strangers out-creeps many of the genre’s contemporaries, including recent horror flops The Ruins and Funny Games.

Produced by Doug Davison, Roy Lee and Nathan Kahane and released by Rogue Pictures, The Strangers is in cinemas now.

Also in theatres, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.

The Strangers Movie

The Strangers Movie

The Strangers Movie

The Strangers Movie

The Strangers Movie

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