Review of “The Strangers: Chapter 3”: “Devils in Disguise”
The masked nonsense comes to an end in the trilogy reboot of “The Strangers,” a truly terrifying 2008 home invasion film. One of horror’s most electrifying home invasion films, Bryan Bertino’s nerve-wracking thriller “The Strangers” (2008) deserves better than the world-expanding but tingle-extinguishing treatment it has received in Renny Harlin’s reboot series, which began two years ago.
Well-duh horror lessons that should (but won’t) sink in now that the third and thankfully final film has flumped into theaters: leave good horror alone, and relentless cat-and-mouse games do not make a movie. This empty trilogy offers few worthwhile returns. Poor Madelaine Petsch looks over it as she reprises her role as Maya, the young woman who survived the home invasion that drove the second, trite chapter of last year.
Here, she again fights the signature villains of “The Strangers”: a trio of disguised killers who, in the original at least, were affectingly creepy anonymous monsters with mysterious motives.
Harlin directs his actors as if their characters are disconnecting from the violence around them—and audiences are likely to do the same—and he slows down the action, even the chases, as if everyone in town is waiting for Godot. Harlin heavily relies on loud jump scares and other obvious slasher elements, as he has done in previous “Strangers” films.
These choices might enthrall “Strangers” fans, but they will numb anyone who wants horror to offer solicitude and novel concepts. There is no bite in the flashbacks meant to investigate the killers’ motives. Alan R., one of the returning writers, thinly sketched Maya, created by Cohen and Alan Freedland, is a shapeless, one-of-a-kind final girl, fitting for this helpless final girl.
