Something you might not know about The Strangers: Chapter 2 – other than that it even exists to begin with – is that it is a sequel to the film that attempted to reboot The Strangers rather than a follow-up to the 2008 original. Its direct predecessor lived and died quietly in 2018, but with two sequels already in the can, Renny Harlin and his crew scrambled to complete some reshoots based on audience feedback. The OG Strangers, fronted by Liv Tyler, was one of the many noughties horrors (see also: Hostel, Eden Lake, Steven Sheil’s Mum & Dad) inspired by a decade of news headlines of terror attacks and torture that tapped into a growing paranoia around strangers. No longer was the call coming from inside the house, but rather violent acts were inflicted on unsuspecting suburbanites and tourists with no discernible motive other than to fill cinemas with rubbernecking horror fans. Rebooting The Strangers could have been a chance to explore this fear of the other two decades on, but instead Harlin’s rehash is as much of a hack job as the murders’ weapon of choice.
In The Strangers: Chapter 1, young couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez)’s remote AirBnB turns from an intimate engagement location to a living nightmare when they find themselves surrounded by masked killers. It is a shoddy remake of the original, and its sequel, The Strangers: Chapter 2, picks up where the previous film left off, with Maya recovering in hospital, the sole survivor of this murder spree – although her anonymous attackers are determined to finish her off. Maya must now escape the strangely deserted hospital (seriously, where are all the staff?) and run barefoot into the woods in search of help.
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Harlin might have made a crucial mistake in resuscitating this long dead horror film and turning it into a bloated trilogy, but at least he made the right choice in turning the second installment into something closer to a survival horror than a slasher. Justifiably traumatised by recent events, Maya is no longer able to discern friend or foe, which leads to one particularly tense car ride where she struggles to deduce whether she has ended up hitching with her assailants. The Strangers: Chapter 2 works – and does so more often than its predecessor – in these moments when Maya’s instinct kicks in and she runs further from safety or danger, the audience wrapped up in her growing uncertainty and erratic actions. When the film fails, it is usually due to the obtuse script insisting that this is no random attack but a town wide orchestrated murder spree, like the village of Hot Fuzz with all the humour sucked out.
In order to fill the measly 96-minute run time, there are many flashbacks, both from Maya’s perspective and from the killers as children, arguably making them ‘strangers’ no longer. These flashbacks repeatedly hamper the film, knocking the thrill out of its pace and entertainment. Even a surprisingly chaotic scene – where Maya’s assailant is, erm, a wild boar – is positioned as a planned assault by these psychopaths, who now inexplicably have the ability to sic pigs on their victims. No thanks to this reboot, the Strangers are getting the same studio treatment that fellow fictional antagonists Jigsaw and Cruella de Vil once received: a laboured backstory that no one asked for.