The Strangers: Chapter 1 4 points
The Strangers. Chapter 1United States, 2024
Address: Renny Harling
Script: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland and Bryan Bertino
Duration: 91 minutes
Performers: Madelaine Petsch, Tyan Brow, Matus Lajcak, Olivia Kreutzova, Letizia Fabbri, Froy Gutiérrez, Ben Cartwright.
Premiere: Available in rooms.
Oh, the formulas!, so useful for physics or mathematics, where the order of the factors does not alter the product. On the other hand, in cinema they can work precisely when they are used to surprise, going against the conventions they establish. Because when they are respected in a reverential way, as if they were sacred scriptures, the result is routine, boredom and even indignation or fury. The premiere of The Strangers: Chapter 1 It is a clear example of all this, as its proposal confirms the will to follow a previous line, with the decision to never deviate from it, not even to see if the viewer is still there.
This is the third installment of a saga that, in a clear gesture of narcissism, was built as an immutable imitation of itself. Its first installment, written and directed by Bryan Bertino, took place in 2008 and starred Liv Tayler and Scott Speedman. Although the plot was basic and textbook, the experience was intense due to the director’s ability to arrange the elements of the plot over the action. There, a city couple came to a small rural town to spend a few days in a cabin in the middle of the forest. But the idyllic setting turned into a nightmare when three masked killers began to harass them for no reason.
Ten years later it was released The Strangers: Night Hunt. Although there the place of victim was no longer occupied by a couple but by a typical family, the rest of the story developed following the same, exact structure. This is how we get to 2024, where this is, who knows why it is the Chapter 1, returns to the starting box. Again a couple of kids from the city, the same cabin, the same three masked men, the same harassment. The mirror game continues until the end. The only thing that changes here is that the little town was not the destination of the protagonists, but a mere accident on their trip.
This dazzlement with the original proposal is justified by an idea expressed in the title, whose ambiguity is never clarified and is powerful. It’s about the unknown as to who the strangers are in these stories: Will the three masked representatives of barbarism or those “foreigners” arrived from civilization, who manage to get into the heart of rural darkness? A duality that functions as a sociopolitical mirror of a divided country like the United States, where the economic and cultural tension between the urban and progressive coasts and the conservative center is increasingly open. Unfortunately, that idea has been stuck for three films in the most obvious part of its surface, without contributing anything other than its own emptiness.
