Well, third time’s the charm. It’s no secret that I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about The Strangers Chapter 1 or 2. Trading in the worst of jump scare tactics, while also being remarkably meek, ironic for a franchise defined by its chilling brutality, both films were exhausting exercises in patience as they flailed from one sleazy, underdeveloped sequence to the next. The Strangers – Chapter 3 brings the story to a close in a fashion that’s more self-assured but still just as hollow, malicious and cumbersome as before. At least the trilogy is consistent.
Beginning immediately from where Chapter 2 left off, with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) having caused the death of Pin-Up Girl, one of three masked serial killers, The Strangers, who ritualistically murder visitors to Venus, Oregon, a town so cartoonishly shady even The Wicker Man villagers would give it the side-eye. The two remaining Strangers, identified as Scarecrow and Dollface, thus desire revenge. Upon cornering Maya however, they instead keep her alive in what appears to be an attempt to convert her into a new Stranger, although the lack of dialogue between the trio makes this difficult to identify with certainty. Either way, Maya must escape for a third and final time.
Although none of The Strangers’ films have been particularly good, one can at least see the thinking behind the horror. Inspired in part by the Charles Manson murders, the unease of The Strangers is that their attacks were random and had no real point to them. It didn’t make for compelling films, but there was at least method to the madness. The Strangers – Chapter 3 falls into the same pitfalls as Chapter 2 by adding backstory and purpose to The Strangers’ motives and killings. Therefore, the entire horror factor of the franchise continues to be undermined, making the film unpleasant for outsiders and something of a betrayal for those who enjoy these movies. Either way, it squanders its own thematic draw.
Even if it stayed true to the ethos of the franchise, the film would still be unbearably vacuous. Whether you take it on its own, or as the bookend to a trilogy, there’s no substantive story to speak of. People pursue and kill each other with no real character growth or development – it’s in no way clear what Maya is supposed to learn from her experiences other than that murderers exist. It all feels like a shallow excuse to indulge in violence. Even the most disturbing or savage pictures from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Cannibal Holocaust have a purpose to their violence, however uneasy they make us. The Strangers – Chapter 3 doesn’t. It’s just 90 minutes of graphic things happening, with the attempted rhyme and reasoning ringing hollow due to a mix of convolution and the aforementioned undermining of theme.
Stop me if you’ve read this before, but the film, like its predecessors, is strangely shy about how much graphic material it can show, despite its thirst for violence being one of its only draws. The kills aren’t especially elaborate – most are axe murders save for one car ramming a caravan and one body disposal in a saw mill – but the camera cuts away before the violence gets too much. The blood we do see appears to be heavy CGI but nine times out of ten, the scene cuts away to the characters’ blank reactions as obnoxiously loud sound editing fills the void. In some scenes, the shots don’t even appear to be fully in focus. It’s like even the film has succumbed to its own monotonous formula as characters arrive on the scene and are promptly killed off like a gory revolving door, spinning too fast for us to even appreciate the morbidness.
Not helping the film’s case are the shallowness, and periodic idiocy, of the characters. An accomplice to The Strangers muses in one scene that none of this would’ve happened if Maya had just died in the first place, and yet The Strangers proceed to not kill her even when they have her hostage for half the runtime of the picture. At this rate, the serial killers are asking for their own axings. Maya barely retains any agency, Petsch barely reciting any dialogue for long stretches of time, yet alone a conveying facial expression beyond mild shock or discomfort. Once again, the characters seem to exist purely to serve as victims and killers, nothing more.
To give the film some credit, it does at least build up to a showdown in the end. Where the other two films were meandering for the entirety of their lengths, this one, while drab and vapid, is at least approaching a destination. An element of psychosexual philosophy does somewhat tie the film together in terms of how The Strangers initially formed, and the eventual reasonings behind keeping Maya alive. But these new dimensions aren’t enough to save the film from the perpetual boredom its hollow craftsmanship, unpleasant story, and utter toothlessness gives rise to.
In all honesty, writing this review makes me feel like a broken record. Each chapter of this bare-boned trilogy is so soulless that any one of my three reviews can be taken as blanket coverage of the other two. Trying to rank these three films is like being asked which venomous snake you want to be bitten by first – it’s ultimately an obsolete choice. As an individual film, The Strangers – Chapter 3 is perhaps a touch better than its predecessors, but that’s of little comfort when the craft is still this shoddy, scattershot and nasty, and not in the way that’s intended. My guess is that patrons of the franchise will be irritated and newcomers will be bored senseless. At 91 minutes, the film is at least merciful in its runtime.
1 star
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the website for the title.
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