MichaelEternity’s review published on Letterboxd:
As expected, a blank remake of the already incredibly thin and unnecessary first "Strangers" 16 years ago. Somebody thought, hey y'know the visual panache, added variety and midnight-movie glee that Johannes Roberts put into the sequel, "Prey at Night"? Fuck that, let's go back to the dullest, easiest basics and just riff over and over on the wannabe disturbing tableau of silent masked killers placidly taunting anguished victims. Low body-count slasher antics, a 5-minute scenario stretched out into an entire movie length so that almost nothing consequential is allowed to happen for 90% of the runtime (goodbye suspense), straight-faced torture porn..these are the things we crave.
To make it worse, the only characters we're stuck with all along are some generic guy who looks like he was recruited off a daytime soap opera, and the really nasty, loathsome antagonist from that show "Riverdale" (I only saw a few episodes, I swear) ostensibly playing the sympathetic heroine.
And I guess you can call making a non-embarrassingly bad movie that's in focus and that even secured wide theatrical release a win for Renny Harlin who massively lost it over the past 20 years, but I continue to hope for more from the guy who made so many of my action and horror rewatchable favorites growing up.
Kinda ominous that Lionsgate never announced release dates for the next 2 "Strangers" sequels that were already shot in conjunction with this before it even came out (at least "Horizon Part 2" had the balls to decide on an opening day this year regardless of how well Part 1 does), like are they planning to bury them now that this one didn't perform well? Straight to streaming? Tax write-off, "Batgirl"-style? "Strangers Chapter 1" was an inevitable waste of time but now I'm committed to seeing what kind of TV show-esque serialization they engineered for the next two episodes, so on with it already. They should've released them one weekend at a time over a 3-week period, like Netflix did with the "Fear Street"s a few summers ago. Those movies weren't good either but interest in the whole shebang was properly sustained within that quick little timeframe.
Stray complaints:
- the first stranger to come along is shown in completely blackened silhouette at the front door despite all the light pouring out toward her. If you're going to shroud your villains like this in ambient anonymity, maybe less CGI next time.
- yeah right the stranger guy is sitting there right behind her while she plays the piano, like that old wooden cabin doesn't have creaky floorboards and that chair doesn't make any buckling sound when he gets in or out of it. She's 4 feet away in a silent house! Even with the TV blaring in front of me, I can usually sense when and where my wife is moving around in other rooms in our home. Nobody can maneuver this quietly, unless the protagonist is deaf.
- and for that matter, no one in movies listens to podcasts or uses the TV or music devices or apps/social media on phones to break silence? That's increasingly common behavior these days, yet you never see it in movies. This lady is already creeped out all alone in the cabin out in nowheresville, waiting for her husband to return, yet her only idling is lightly toying with a piano and then taking a silent shower...c'mon! Even on perfectly fine, jolly days home alone when I'm not being stalked by psycho killers, I like having some voice and/or noise in the room with me. Get with the times, Hollywood.
