The Strangers

On the surface, Bryan Bertino’s debut film, The Strangers, is about as derivative as they come. The “plot,” so to speak, is as follows: a beautiful young couple retreat to a summer home in the middle of the night, where they are slowly tormented by mysterious invaders for roughly an hour and a half. The end result sounds like an unironic manifestation of everything Michael Haneke’s Funny Games set out to prove about cinematic violence. The oppressive air of sadism pervading torture-porn outings like Saw and Hostel is on proud display here, even if Bertino’s approach to violence is more suggestive than surgical. And according to U.S. box office reports, audiences are eating it up: The Strangers placed third in its opening weekend, bested only by two inescapable summer hits (Sex and the City and Indiana Jones). At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that redeems the film, keeping its head above the mire of toothless bloodbaths vomited out by Hollywood every year: The Strangers is terrifying as hell.

Against all odds, this is a genuinely scary and brutally suspenseful horror film that earns its frights the old-fashioned way, building tension through long wide-angle shots, perfectly timed cuts, spine-tingling sound editing, and detailed set design. The movie utilizes one location, the isolated summer house, and by the grisly conclusion, the viewer is as familiar with it as the home he or she grew up in. Bertino’s excellent sense of craft all but eradicates preconceived notions about his film’s concept; suddenly the plot is no longer simplistic, but merely another facet of the director’s unsettlingly minimalist approach. And the violence, while graphic, does not feel gratuitous nor does it intend to elicit excitement or approval from the audience (though, unhappily and inevitably, some filmgoers will respond in exactly this way).

After a short prologue wherein we learn some apocryphal statistics about home invasion, the film throws the audience into the middle of a pivotal moment in the lives of two young people. We meet the doomed heroes Kristen and James (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) as they speed down a desolate road, dressed in formal attire, their faces stained with tears over some unknown event. The effect is jarring yet intimate, setting the tone for the rest of the film and establishing a quiet mood that hides deep personal wounds. This sense of quiet is slowly eroded, first by innocent sounds like a record player cooing Joanna Newsom and Wilco, the crackling of a fire, and softly spoken apologies by candlelight. But soon enough, these are overtaken by more menacing noises: a smoke alarm, rattling garbage cans, and the three harsh thuds on the front door that set the two on a course of psychologically horrific events.

Bertino masterfully uses sound to disturb and disorient the viewer, but it's his imagery and camerawork that solidify the audience's paranoia and terror. For example, early in the film before the leads have any notion of the threatening intent of their tormentors, Kristen, left alone by James who has gone to the store, lights up a cigarette to calm herself. An interminably wide shot captures the scene as she smokes on the far left side of the screen while the viewer is invited to observe the detailed living room. When she exhales her first puff, however, we see a gray masked face where the cloud of smoke should be, hovering only a few feet behind her, the distance of the shot making the two seem even closer, disaster all the more imminent. It's an effectively shocking panorama, exhibiting more sophistication than the audience could ever expect from both the film's subject matter and Bertrino's inexperience as a first-time director. Eli Roth may be heralded as the next Sam Raimi, and Neil Marshall the self-proclaimed successor to John Carpenter, but based on scenes like this, Bertino is poised to surpass them both as the most talented young blood-letter around.

There's been a lot of talk surrounding both The Strangers and Funny Games and the unsatisfying lack of catharsis at the close of the each film (the fates of Kristen and James are all but sealed within the first five minutes so I'm not giving anything away here). In Funny Games, the ending is designed to prove a point: audiences love violence as long as the victim fights back and wins, otherwise it's cruel and upsetting. But what do we make of the senseless murders at the conclusion of The Strangers? I suppose this ending could be viewed as a more implicit rendering of the same message, regardless of whether it is Bertino's intent. Or maybe, as many critics have suggested, it's just mean-spirited and unnecessary. Roger Ebert, in his one-and-a-half star review writes, "What a waste of a perfectly good first act! And what a maddening, nihilistic, infuriating ending!"

But while the audience might feel better for a few minutes about themselves and how they spent their Saturday night had the characters made it out alive, would such an ending make The Strangers a better movie? Not necessarily. It might even make it a worse movie, or if nothing else a less effective one. The fact that Kristen and James cannot and will not escape (knowledge shared by the audience, the perpetrators, and eventually the victims themselves) is a large part of what makes the movie so psychologically unnerving, stretching the notion of "you can run, but you can't hide" to outrageous proportions. It may not be fun, but it is undeniably intense. And for horror fans, it doesn't get much better than watching a talented filmmaker utilize every cinematic trick imaginable for the sole purpose of scaring the shit out of people.