Week of May 29, 2008, Issue #658
FILM
The Strangers
Character and assassination: Strangers has smart chills, but lacks panache
JONATHAN BUSCH / jonathan@vueweekly.com
Two effective sub-genres of horror stand in the foreground of Bryan Bertino’s first feature The Strangers: both an ambiguously character-driven European thriller and a gritty, early-Wes Craven domestic massacre. In a sense, it also bears a striking originality that surpasses the most recent weak-willed popular American scary movies that aim to fool audiences into attending for a couple weekends until everybody realizes how shitty they are. Though at times predictable and overcalculated, The Strangers takes some sincere risks in fucking around with our expectations. And that makes me feel, well, appreciated.
After a less-than-successful marriage proposal during a wedding reception, James (Scott Speedman) takes his girlfriend Kristen (Liv Tyler) to his family’s summer home in the country. Having prepared a romantic dinner and a rose-petal strewn bed, they instead settle into a bucket of ice cream and a quiet bath upon arriving. For a moment, they forget the awkwardness of the evening and rekindle their intimacy, until a late-night knock at the door. After answering, a shadowed woman’s face mistakenly asks for a name that isn’t familiar, and something feels like it just ain’t right.
James offers to step out to buy Kristen a new pack of cigarettes, leaving her to wander through the house alone with her thoughts. But the stranger calls at the door again, confirming Kristen’s suspicion that there is good reason to be scared. James returns, though it makes her feel only so much safer as lipstick-penned messages appear on the windows, commencing the wrath of a gang of masked stalkers on the house that are after more than just a cup of sugar.
The thoughtful character element of The Strangers, that which sees James and Kristen alienated from their relationship at the beginning, builds a romantic tension like horror-thrillers made abroad. In Michael Haneke’s Caché, for instance, Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche discover a frustrating rift in the marriage as a stalkers enter their lives, while in Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, a complicated lesbian lets her secret love for her best friend get the better of her before a rapist truck driver kills almost everyone. Bertino’s film escorts the method, otherwise knows as an intriguing subplot, to share the slab with a bloody Halloween-style chase through the woods.
The Strangers also abandons the notion that the audience is obligated to sense-making devices that wrap its loosely conceived events in a clarified package. It’s precisely the missing pages that turn out the most chilling results, from the slow, creeping methods of the mysterious hoodlums as they surround the house to the incapable, emasculated efforts of James to protect Kristen and himself. At times, its weirdness keeps the film very much in the moment, situating the audience in an immediate tension that parallels the experience of the victims.
Though there are clearly intended and wonderful gaps in the plot, it’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t play stylistic chicken with itself. A couple nail-biting techniques become quickly overused, such as when the murderers frequently creep behind an unsuspecting Kristen, or when the masks, which almost trump the Ghostface costume in Scream, pop out of the darkness. The caution that the film takes with the linearity of its presentation are what makes the events a tad predictable. Such a terrifyingly conceived nightmare deserves to feel like one—with that castrating suspension of reality that occurs in the ceiling shot of Detective Arbogast’s murder on the staircase in Psycho, or the giant teddy bear giving oral sex to an old man in The Shining. Though otherwise successful, Bertino deserves to make like Hitchcock or Kubrick and push the imagination of The Strangers toward more traumatic territory. V
Opens Fri, May 30
The Strangers
Written & directed by Bryan Bertino
Starring Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman
THREE STARS
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