The Strangers — Chapter 2 Review: A Strangely Entertaining Sequel To A Terrible Slasher

Shooting an entire trilogy of movies back-to-back in less than two months was always going to be a recipe for disaster. "The Strangers: Chapter 1" felt as rushed as its highly unusual production suggested, rebooting the cult horror franchise as a formulaic slasher that broadly followed the playbook of the 2008 original without the creeping sense of voyeurism. The original was purposefully mundane because it made you a fly on the wall, as uncertain as the characters as to whether each noise heard held some sinister intent; the remake was mundane for ironing out those quirks to become another run-of-the-mill tale of a young couple surviving sinister forces in a secluded cabin. It was rejected by critics and audiences alike, and the original plan to release the full trilogy in theaters before the end of 2024 was scrapped. Director Renny Harlin's own "Horizon: An American Saga" was unfolding before our eyes, but to far less outcry that we wouldn't soon be seeing the rest.

However, the radio silence here was out of self-awareness, with Harlin and the cast treating the response to the first film as if it were a test screening, returning for significant "enhancement shoots" (as reported by Bloody Disgusting) to rework the next installments. It's textbook PR crisis management talk, right down to avoiding using the word "reshoot" to suggest they're not deviating from the original plan, just improving on it. And yet, watching "The Strangers — Chapter 2," it's clear that far more course correction went ahead — while it doesn't offer anything you haven't seen in a slasher movie before, the pivot to survival thriller mode feels like a breath of fresh air after a tiresome prior installment with no unique ideas, and no suggestion of any impending change to the worn out formula.

Here, Renny Harlin reminds us why he was such a go-to studio horror and action filmmaker in the late '80s and '90s, structuring the film as a series of escalating chase sequences around a sinister town where our heroine (Madelaine Petsch) conceivably views everyone as a killer without a mask. It's paranoid, largely dialogue free, and until the final act, light on the overall number of kills you'd expect from the genre despite the mounting intensity of each consecutive set piece — I have no idea what aficionados will make of it, especially considering their knives are already out. I just found it hard to believe the same creative team as the last film was responsible for bringing something so comparably bold to life.

We open where the last one left off (check out our video if you need a recap); Petsch's Maya waking up in a hospital ward after seeing the brutal murder of her boyfriend (Froy Gutierrez) — whose marriage proposal she had only just accepted — seemingly seconds earlier. There's little time to rest though, as she hears hospital staff killed on the other side of the door and needs to escape to meet her older sister (Rachel Shenton) and leave rural Oregon behind. Easier said than done when the three masked killers from the previous night are still on her tail and have locked down the building so she can't escape — and even if she does, she has no clue as to their identities, meaning every interaction is laced with terror. It's a driving sense of paranoia that's successfully sustained throughout, helping to elevate various set pieces that, while well-staged, aren't exactly original. We've seen creepy hospitals and late-night walks around pitch-black woods before, but as we're staying largely within Maya's headspace, her uncertainty and post-traumatic stress makes many familiar tropes feel novel.

The second act embraces the survival thriller tag more directly, stranding Maya in the wilderness and forcing her to fend for herself despite the mounting number of injuries she's sustained. Renny Harlin even goes as far to pay homage to "The Revenant" to make this genre comparison more obvious, although with all the best will in the world, Madelaine Petsch will not be following Leonardo DiCaprio's footsteps to the Oscar stage for her extensive fight scene with a bloodthirsty CGI feral hog. That scene did prompt some laughs at my screening despite being framed as a grueling battle between woman and beast, but I admired the big swing it took; as with most of the first two acts, it's almost completely dialogue free, and strips the hallmarks of both chase and survival narratives down to the barest of elements. It's not exactly what you come to a "Strangers" movie for, but Harlin manages to maintain the creeping dread that they're just out of frame at any given moment, even as the immediate obstacles Maya faces couldn't be further removed from masked murderers.

With that being said, the biggest disappointment of the film is the third act, where screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland shatter the mystique of their antagonists, diving far too deep into their origin story in a way that threatens to derail the whole premise — reportedly the biggest change in the reshoots, with Harlin quoted as saying audiences wanted to find out more about who the Strangers were. As with prior movies, the film opens with onscreen text informing us how many Americans are killed by strangers annually, only to gradually scrap the notion of killers who randomly target people for no reason other than pure love of the game. The reason such underwritten villains have captured the public imagination is because they indiscriminately kill without any contextual purpose — we could feasibly be next on the chopping block due to the way in which they choose their targets with no driving motivation.

"The Strangers — Chapter 2" strays from this creeping threat to directly illuminate on the figures behind the masks, and the early events in their lives which started them on the path to notoriety. It's a functional backstory for this new iteration of the franchise and nicely sets up a forthcoming third installment that I assume will be more anticipated than this one is, but it's inherently in conflict with the overarching premise of these movies. If the killers aren't just a random group attacking for kicks and their motivation is made apparent, then the way these films are structured makes it harder to recapture and sustain the paranoid tension that drove the first two acts here. By the time of the next film, you could successfully file a false advertising lawsuit against the notion that they still are strangers to Petsch's scream queen. With these significant caveats in mind, however, "The Strangers — Chapter 2" is still a significant, genuinely improbable improvement on its predecessor. I'm as shocked writing this as you are reading it.

"The Strangers — Chapter 2" creeps into theaters on September 26.