The Strangers (2008)
Directed by Bryan Bertino
Written by Bryan Bertino
Starring Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler
Release Date May 30th, 2008
Published June 4th, 2008
Sociopathic thrill killing is a real thing. Real sociopaths have stalked complete strangers and taken their lives simply for the thrill of exercising the power of life and death. It's incomprehensible to anyone with a moral compass but some people have the ability to look at another person and take their life without so much as a scruple. That is the basic premise of the new horror flick The Strangers. A young couple returns home to their cabin on the outskirts of some nameless town and are then terrorized by three people in Halloween masks. The harassment goes from merely irritating to terrifyingly violent in short order, whether the young couple survives remains a mystery to the very end.
Kristen and James have just arrived home after attending a friends wedding. James had thought it was a good opportunity to ask Kristen to marry him but as we can tell from his hangdog expression and the tears in her eyes, it didn't go down as he had hoped. Nevertheless, they are together for the weekend, out of town guests at James's father's cabin. There is tension but mostly sadness between them as the love they thought they shared is reflected throughout the cabin where James had planned romance to follow his popping the question.
The sadness is broken up by a 4 Am knock on the door. An odd young woman asks if Tammy is home. Assured that no one named Tammy had ever lived in the cabin the girl leaves. However, she isn't gone long and as James makes a cigarrette run, the girl returns, again searching for Tammy. Here is where my feelings about The Strangers diverge from my appreciation for the craftsmanship of The Strangers. I did not believe the reaction of Liv Tyler or Scott Speedman's characters to this intrusion. They are far too polite to someone who visits at 4 IN THE MORNING!
Not an angry word? No, hey it's 4 go home! Nothing. This facile politeness continues even as the visit from the strangers go from merely irritating to dangerously violent. Take for instance James who finds his car with tires slashed and the windshield broken. His reaction is to ask far too calmly why they had destroyed his car? From there he makes use of the films PG-13 allotment of F-words. The MPAA allows a PG -13 movie only one F-word per script, any more than that gets an R. Whoever spent time coming up with that standard of protecting the fragile ears of our teens.
Speedman, who I loved on TV's Felicity, has evolved into a Hugh Jackman clone, handsome and weepy. Watch the Underworld movies and he has his moments of cool but mostly he's dewy eyed and whiny. In The Strangers he plays one of the most notable wussies on film. As he and his girl are terrorized by nutballs in halloween masks, Speedman's James is endlessly polite and even after there is a death, remains deferential when it comes to the use of violence. At one point he gets his hands on a shotgun and gets the opportunity to use it on the masked wackos. He fails because he's too much of a wuss to pull the trigger.
For her part Liv Tyler exists to be Liv Tyler. We know Liv Tyler well enough to emapthize with her with little effort. We can't imagine Liv being the victim of psycho killers even if we can't really imagine her going badass in her defense. She being Liv Tyler, an actress we have know for more than a decade, we know that someone will come to save her. We know that. Right? If The Strangers gets one thing right it's convincing us that Liv Tyler might not survive this even as the logic of the recognizable female damsel in distress, tells us otherwise.
Director Brian Bertino has a talent for telling a tight, compact story with skill and precision. His weakness is crafting believable characters to drop into the intriguing scenario. Bertino wrote the script for The Strangers and thus it's his fault that Speedman's James is weak hero and that the killers take on a supernatural quality at odd with the down to earth scenario. The killers are irritating because they aren't meant to be ghosts yet they take on some modestly supernatural abilities. They have the ability to be two steps ahead of their victims at all times. They can appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. These killers seem to be perfect in every way because they are indestructible, unflappable and always out in front of our weak in the knees heroes.
Without believable characters it's difficult to become to involved in The Strangers. You feel for the young couple on a human, emotional level but as characters in an entertainment you are left with a who cares feeling. Wussy hero vs perfect killer equals uninvolving, unengaging action. I was never frightened or moved by The Strangers. It engenders in the end only a shrug of indifference.
"Hey Sean what did you think of The Strangers?"
"Meh" Shrug.
