The Strangers - Review

Director: Bryan Bertino
Writer: Bryan Bertino
Starring: Liv Tyler/Scott Speedman
Runtime: 90 minutes

The Strangers is a very chilling, very well put together movie.

It has all of the elements which I like in a horror flick: small cast, limited setting, limited timeframe. Horror movies that are drilled down in time and space always seem to do well, especially when they're of the "slasher" variety. The bigger a slasher movie gets, the more it sloshes around in the middle, until you need a bunch of dumb teenagers (with the bad dialogue they entail) to play easy victims and keep the thing moving.

In The Strangers, writer and director Bryan Bertino says to hell with it. He goes old school, and it works.

Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) are on their way back from a friend's wedding reception. They arrive at a country home in the woods, planning to spend the weekend.

All is not sunshine and music in their lives. Kristen is obviously upset about something, and Hoyt is quiet and depressed. We come to learn that something at the wedding went wrong between them, and now the champagne and the flowers in the house are meaningless.

This drew my interest right away. A horror movie that doesn't begin happy and carefree? Since when? As we all know, the rule book says that a horror movie must have a positive value at the beginning, so that when things get dark, it makes things seem very bad indeed.

Bertino shelves the rule book, and it's for the best. This film is spooky, but it's also very unsettling. Even the early scenes between Kristen and Hoyt have a feeling of dread. It only get worse when there's a knock at the door, and Hoyt asks, "What is it, four in the morning?"

Bad news. If you're in the middle of the woods at 4 AM, who do you think will be knocking at the door, the Avon lady, or a guy with an ax?

There are a couple of gaping holes in this film, as there are in most horror pics. I wasn't bothered by any of them. Bertino uses the old device of "what you don't see is what scares you," and it works as always. I remember last year seeing Vacancy and thinking that it was a great flick...until 25 minutes into it they blew the identity of the killers and I wasn't scared anymore. The Strangers doesn't make that mistake.

The Strangers will not leave you feeling great about life. It doesn't sew things up neatly in the Hollywood tradition. I didn't mind that, but I did mind one minor detail at the end of the film. I won't talk about it here, but I felt that Bertino caved in. The ending was good, but it could have been better if he'd left exactly 2.5 seconds out of the scene. That's a shame, because the rest of the movie was fine.

The movie states that it is "inspired by true events." I searched high and low for details about these events, but didn't come up with much. As always, beware the letter "s" in the word "events." The movie could be a hybrid of two stories, or twenty. In any case, it's a good, scary thriller and you should see it.