The end of Renny Harlin’s “The Strangers – Chapter 1” left this viewer cautiously optimistic that this trilogy—shot at the same time and cut into three chapters—would improve in the second installment. Now that what was basically a remake of Bryan Bertino’s original was out of the way, Harlin and his team could get someplace new and interesting in the follow-up. Nah. It turns out the creators of this cash grab are aggressively unwilling to go much of anywhere at all. The “Two Towers” of this series is a leaden bore, a movie that alternates between making no sense at all and insulting the intelligence of the pour souls who see it. Harlin can still compose a shot or two—he knows how to frame a menacing figure in a doorway or backlit by headlights—and star Madelaine Petsch is innocent, totally committed to her physical performance, but it’s almost more disheartening to see her put through the motions for a movie with no internal logic or respect for its audience.
“The Strangers – Chapter 2” is so reliant on what audiences know about the masked figures from both the original and first chapter, while also being largely set-up for a third chapter. This willingness to do nothing new while also hinting at better stuff to come gives “Chapter 2” an airless, hollow quality that’s numbing. None of this matters. Who cares? We’ve seen middle chapters before that stand on their own, but we’ve rarely seen one so blatantly uninterested in doing that. One of the writers said in his Fantastic Fest introduction that he submitted a 260-page script, and it’s clearer than ever that they just cut it in thirds instead of breaking it out into three films that could stand on their own.
So what happens in “Chapter 2”? After what is basically a previously-on segment through flashbacks that feels endless, we learn that Maya has survived the attack from the first film, but can’t get out of town for some reason, and she starts to wonder if everyone around her might be one of the masked figures who killed her fiancé and tried to kill her. Almost everyone she meets, including a Sheriff played by genre legend Richard Brake, acts shady as Hell, in a way designed to make her and us question if they might have doll or sack masks in their trunk. At one point, I actually started to wonder if the original twist on the subject was that everyone Maya ran into was a mask-wearing stranger, but this movie ain’t that interesting.
Of course, Maya ends up stalked by the strangers again, starting at a hospital that appears abandoned. Seriously, there’s no one in any rooms or floors monitoring Maya or there to help until a poor soul gets axed in the morgue. Guess he didn’t get the memo to stay home that day.
Maya escapes (over and over again), and gets on the road, bouncing in and out of cars of people who might be saviors or monsters. At one point as the movie feels like it’s getting bored with itself, she’s in the woods and she’s attacked by a giant CGI wild boar. I am not making this up. It is one of the most ridiculously conceived and executed things I’ve seen in a horror film in years, something that doesn’t make sense physically or thematically, other than just to torture our heroine a bit more. Luckily, she happens to stumble on a weapon. This is a movie/franchise when screenwriter luck saves the day more than once.
All of it culminates in a sequence in an ambulance that makes no physical sense and a series of flashbacks that fill in some of the motives for characters who were supposed to have no motive. The whole terrifying thrust of “The Strangers” is that the home invasion was random, and this film has the nerve to open with a stat about the prevalence of attacks by strangers in the country, only to then offer back story to the murderous strangers. And it’s silly back story, a portrayal of sociopathic behavior that apparently has been in these masked figures for years. I’m half-convinced that they’re going to connect the strangers’ back story to Maya’s in the third chapter, making this even less about random violence. After this one, I’m truly scared to answer the door for chapter 3.
This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest. It opens on September 26, 2025.
