The bizarre, failed experiment that is the three-part reboot/reimagining of “The Strangers” from director Renny Harlin is mercifully complete. Shot at the same time in 2022 (with reported reshoots after the first movie bombed), the trilogy that ends with this week’s “The Strangers: Chapter 3” is a true oddity, a series of films that never justified its existence. The third chapter is better than the middle one by virtue of having at least a few new ideas and one less CGI wild boar, but it’s still a shapeless mess, a movie that might have worked as the final act of one film. It feels like writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland learned about the three-act structure in screenwriting class and decided to turn that concept into a trilogy of full-length films to see if that would work. It did not.
And yet it’s easy to see the one two-hour film that could have resulted if producers had told everyone here to calm down and just make one good flick instead of three bad ones. “Chapter 1” basically remade the Bryan Bertino film, a home invasion thriller that has only improved with age. The original is taut, unpredictable, and genuinely terrifying in its randomness, a key element that this series discards, totally misunderstanding that attacks by unpredictable strangers work best without back story. In retrospect, the 2-star “Chapter 1” that was so critically slammed is the best of the three. It makes the mind reel to consider how bad these other chapters could have been before the feedback reshoots. Now imagine “Chapter 1” is the first act of a film, which then transitions into the escape narrative of “Chapter 2” and into the revelations and body count of “Chapter 3.” That might have worked. We’ll never know.
“Chapter 3” opens with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) still on the run after the climax of “Chapter 2” left one of the Strangers dead. Maya doesn’t get far before she’s back in the grip of the head sociopath Gregory (Gabriel Basso), who happens to be the offspring of the town sheriff (Richard Brake). The last film revealed that Gregory and Shelly (Ema Horvath) were childhood murderers, and this one goes downright “Dexter” by suggesting that the sheriff, and most of the town, has protected their beloved serial killers as long as they abide by one rule: Only kill out-of-towners, aka strangers.
The best new idea of this series that “Chapter 3” shallowly explores is when Gregory and Shelly basically try to turn Maya into the third point in their torture triangle, replacing the dead Pin-Up Girl with their recent prey. Petsch remains the greatest asset of these films, moving from her physical turn in the last two to a kind of state of shock that allows her to potentially be turned from a victim into a murderer. Again, as a third act of a film that starts with a quickie remake of the original? It could have been a story of how trauma can make people into sociopaths, even someone who just watched her partner get murdered. But Cohen and Freedland don’t have the courage to get truly weird with these movies and “Chapter 3” ultimately becomes a pretty predictable, poorly made thriller, complete with more out-of-towners to meet the sharp end of Gregory’s axe in Maya’s sister and brother-in-law.
As I said about the last film, “Harlin can still compose a shot or two,” and that remains true, maybe even more so regarding this entry, but his workman aesthetic doesn’t fit a trilogy that needed to get weirder to find a personality or at least bring it back to its roots. Even the strongest visuals are in service of a story that gets further and further away from what worked about the original, and it can’t find a strong enough new identity in these smoky woods.
What’s most striking is how little genuine tension and fear is produced by this final chapter. What was once so scary—a cautionary tale of a couple being terrorized by random strangers—has turned into a trilogy of films that can’t even figure out what story it wants to tell. Through it all, Petsch is the real survivor, pushing through the shoddy screenwriting to do everything she can to make it interesting. By the end, I wasn’t rooting for the fictional Maya to survive the night as much as for the actress who plays her to move on to better material.
