THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2
Directed by Renny Harlin
I knew I was going to be away from this site for a while, mostly for work reasons, but I didn’t expect The Strangers to return before I did. In the second instalment of an unnecessary new trilogy, shot back-to-back, director Renny Harlin gives us another technically competent but frustratingly idealess slice of stalk-and-slash. Taking up from where the last one left off, Maya wakes up in a hospital bed alone and missing her fiancé, who was torn to pieces last time around. At least she’s somewhere safe, right? Wrong: within a couple of minutes, the lights are flickering and there are orderlies killed offscreen. Our masked trio, Dollface, Man in the Mask, and Pin-Up Girl are back to complete what they started.
For around the first third, I was surprisingly engrossed in it. Sure, we know Maya isn’t going to be bumped off in the opening scenes, since it’s part two of three, and she’s pretty much the only named character at the beginning. But Harlin knows how to up the ante and, like Halloween 2, turns the weirdly understaffed hospital into an eerie maze of locked doors and endless, samey corridors. One unfortunate bit, involving a morgue, even carries some dramatic impact. These scenes represent the movie at its best, combining the raw viciousness of Prey at Night with the paranoia of the original, and almost justify leaving the house to see it. But unfortunately, it’s all downhill as soon as she gets out and enters the surrounding area to find help.
Trading in the close quarters of the other movies for a more open woodland seems a great idea on paper, making the series’ usual hunting dynamic seem more primal. The problem is the woods just look like woods, and the writers have to continually find reasons why Maya can’t simply leave, leading to a tedious cycle of her getting into a vehicle before the Strangers show up. Then her having to exit the vehicle, bruised, and find another to go through the same cycle. Between these automobile misadventures, Maya has short-lived fracases, before needlessly dropping her weapons after one use and ignoring obvious opportunities to kill her foes. I know fear makes us do strange things, and it’s only a movie, but there are a handful of times where she seems to ignore easy ways out for sheer plot convenience. More filler than killer.
Aside from the last few minutes, which set up a franchise finale quite neatly, it’s remarkable how little actually happens to advance the overall plot. Yeah, we get a few new faces, and there’s some attempt to further characterise the small town of Venus. But it’s less than the sum of its parts, and for most of the second half, I was wondering if it could have been distilled into a leaner, punchier, half-hour opening act for the next one. Most notably, there’s an unintentionally funny animal attack sequence that feels like it’s been taken from a B-movie. Petsch does the best with a generic role and is literally dragged through the mud in this one, but the plot armour means it never really feels like she’s in much danger. A mid-credit teaser hints at a potentially interesting, if samey, arc coming up, but in this entry, she’s the kind of bland final girl you’d struggle to describe in unique adjectives.
There are some misguided attempts to give the titular villains a backstory; something long-running franchises tend to do since we’re really coming back for the baddies. I’m not actually against going behind the mask here, even if it undermines what people liked about the first. However, what we get is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, and it feels more like box-ticking than organic world-building. We get a little too acquainted with the Strangers, and not in a way I think will make many viewers like them more. I quite liked the brief mythos we delve into, exploring the origins of the signature question: “Is Tamara home?” Presumably, we’ll get more in Chapter 3, since there are decades of unaccounted hijinks, but this film epitomises the notion that sometimes less is more. Overall, The Strangers Chapter 2 is roughly as good (or as bad) as its predecessor: a barely passable throwback that would be fine to throw on in the background but is rarely interesting enough to warrant your full attention. Still, part of being a horror fan is thinking One Battle After Another, which came out the same day, looks ace, while this looks like a load of bobbins, but still prioritising it instead. In other words, Harlin, I’ll see you next Halloween for the ending.
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