The Strangers is a missed opportunity. Bryan Bertino is no doubt talented. Much of the movie is edge-of-your-seat tense, almost maddening. But too often Bertino the writer has no faith in Bertino the director – or maybe the writer in Bertino just isn’t as gifted as the director. A lot of the storytelling technique on display here was fresh and thrilling thirty years ago but is markedly less so now. Bertino relies far too heavily on re-visiting horror clichés. He’s either more skilled than he realizes or too arrogant to find himself a decent writer. He cheats to bolster his effects. Too many times he relies on his characters making baffling choices to create a dangerous situation. Other times his villains, decidedly human, seem to develop super-human powers of stealth and strength.

The plot is simple enough. Two attractive young people (the hapless Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) are the victims of a sadistic, vicious home invasion in the woods. No reason is given for the attack. That’s part of the point: we’re supposed to empathize with their helplessness in the void, the naked terror they feel when faced with the cold randomness of violent forces in the world. But Bertino leaves us on the outside of their plight with manipulation and tricks. You can see it coming. When we first meet them we’re already most of the way through their night and something big has just happened – they’re each an emotional mess. This is all we know at first. Within minutes however we are shown what has happened: she has turned down his proposal of marriage. No reason is discernible why, dramaturgically, Bertino uses flashback to tell this part of the story, we don’t learn any more about the characters by starting partway through the events of the night. He just does it. It feels like a bald conceit with no grounding, no necessity and it is. Outside of that the beginning is effective enough. Kristen and James (Tyler and Speedman respectively) desperately fumble their way towards each other, trying to find some ground for connection. In the middle of this they are interrupted by someone at the door – at four in the morning. A strange young woman with her face in the shadows asks for someone who is not there. When told she is at the wrong house she leaves with a simple, “See you later.” It’s creepy alright. It’s also the last piece of honest, original storytelling in the movie. Everything else is directly from the John Carpenter/Brian DePalma school of shocks. We see the blond girl later standing in the shadows and then disappearing a la Michael Myers in Halloween. Masked faces appear in windows. Objects in the house mysteriously move from one place to another. It would be scary except too often it doesn’t feel attached to reality. If the smoke alarm moves from the floor (where Tyler left it) to a stool, why doesn’t she then behave as though someone else is in the house? The phone cord is cut inside the house…but she doesn’t mention this to her disbelieving boyfriend when he returns from buying her cigarettes.

This then, becomes the annoying game the viewer plays throughout the movie. He leaves her after the creepy meeting with the blond girl at four in the morning. They’re way out in the middle of nowhere. Does she really need cigarettes that bad, right then? When she calls him to tell him the girl came back asking the question she asked before that doesn’t set off a red flag? By the time he comes back the ante has been upped considerably but when she tells him she saw a man with a mask in the window he doesn’t believe her. Huh? She’s crying, her hand is cut, she’s not saying she “heard something” or that she thought she “saw something in the shadows” – she says she saw a man wearing a mask in the window – and he doesn’t believe her! Does she usually hallucinate like that? Of course, she doesn’t show him the phone cord that has been cut inside the house.

When the attack starts even though the killers (we know they’re killers because we were pretty much told this at the beginning of the movie) are wearing full masks they are able to get around in the dark, in a house they are not familiar with, better than the two protagonists who do know the house and aren’t wearing masks and therefore have the benefit of their entire peripheral vision. In fact, the bad guys can even run through the woods at full speed in these masks and not make a sound or trip over a branch or run into a tree. Try wearing a sack over your head with the eyes cut out and running through the woods some time at night. See how well you do. For some reason, when Liv Tyler plugs her phone into the wall it still doesn’t work. I don’t know why. The bad guys ram the protagonists’ car with their truck -- repeatedly -- yet the truck suffers no damage and can still run just fine. When a friend comes by he gets a rock thrown through his windshield but does he tear out of there and go call the police? No, he gets out of his car – again in the dark in the middle of nowhere—says “what the fuck” to no one in particular, walks into the house which has obviously been violently intruded, but never turns around, never checks his back to see if anyone is behind him. I mean, that’s what I would do. How many times must the hero leave the woman in the house by herself and take the gun with him? Wouldn’t you stay together at all times if for no other reason than to have an extra set of eyes? Maybe that’s just me. Another time the masked girl is standing there ten feet away from Tyler with a knife in her hand. Tyler is backed up against the kitchen counter. There are knives, forks, spatulas, pots, pans, whatever. I couldn’t help feeling that if it was me that bitch would be eating a toaster.

But it’s not me -- I get that. And people make stupid or inexplicable choices in stressful situations – I get that too. It’s simply too hard to buy into a movie where so much of the tension is dependent upon clichés, re-tread ground, suspension of belief in physics and the stupidity of the characters. Suspense is generated, certainly, but the viewer is so annoyed by the idiocy of the choices made that when the heroine finally succumbs and gets her face slammed against a wall it’s a relief. We’re glad it’s over. By this point the viewer just wants the whole sadistic mess to end. Of course, sadistically speaking, we’re just beginning. I suppose I’d be giving away the ending if I said anymore but if you haven’t figured it out by now…

Well, if you haven’t figured it out by now than this movie is probably just for you. Enjoy. It’s not like it doesn’t have scary parts. Tyler continues to surprise with her depth of feeling. Everytime I think "this time, she's going to falter" she doesn't. She's an unusual presence on-screen. She's a talented, if limited actor and does what she can to salvage this mess. You feel for her Kristen. Tyler's particular brand of attractiveness is vulnerable, soft. She doesn't have that "I eat puny mortals for breakfast" beauty that a lot of Hollywood stars have. Her face lets you in. When James asks Kristen to marry him you know her answer-- and why. You watch her face cave in with pain. When Kristen is attacked later her terror and confusion are palpable. Speedman is not so lucky but it's hard to tell what he might have accomplished because his character feels so stupid. Sometimes, in horror movies you just want the protagonist to be smart, to fight back, to think about what they're going to do. They don't have to win. The good guys don't always. But the ending here feels like a cop-out and frankly, makes the movie unnecessary. Do we really need one more movie telling us that we’re all alone in the world and it’s a dangerous place? Do we need to be told yet again that there really is no God, nor morality, nor rhyme or reason to reality; that bad things happen to good people and maybe without meaning? We’ve been hearing this from horror more than anyplace else for the last fifty years. It’s no longer an original thought. It’s been done well and it’s been done poorly. When the motive for this heinous crime is “revealed” at the end I didn’t think “oh, shit!” I thought, “No shit. Yawn.”

Frankly, this movie is both disappointing and hopeful. Bryan Bertino shows definite promise. He wears his influences on his sleeve and hopefully he’ll grow out of that. Hopefully also, he’ll learn to have a little more faith in his obvious gifts and find a writer who will give him a decent story with exciting and intelligent characters to flesh out. If these things happen we may find we have a remarkable talent on our hands. If not we’ll wind up with yet another cynical button-pusher, the kind the Hollywood machine routinely churns out. But inside of Bryan Bertino there is a movie artist fighting to get out. It just remains to be seen whether or not Bertino will give that artist the space to breathe.

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Angela Mac   |67.142.161.xxx |2008-12-07 23:19:03 After reading the intro, I'm quite curious to read the rest -- but only *after* I see the film. I'm afraid your summation of it is so confident, it might leave a lingering impression.... and horror functions best with virgin eyes. Or, at least, eyes that haven't read too much about the flick. I can only aspire to the latter.

Bobby B  - By all means...   |76.115.19.xxx |2008-12-10 12:00:04 ...see the movie. It could be important later if this director moves on towards bigger and better things, which I have every reason to believe he will.

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