It was hard for me to believe that it has already been a decade since Bryan Bertino’s home-invasion thriller The Strangers led a resurgence of sorts for the low budget home-invasion thriller. While it’s not a perfect film, it’s one I can admire for using some restraint in letting its creepiness get under your skin from time to time rather than using gratuitous gore and jump scares. It was far more successful by lingering a long shot on Liv Tyler smoking a cigarette, oblivious to the out-of-focus figure standing just a few feet behind her in the darkness.
Just shy of ten years later the eponymous psychopaths are back, this time terrorizing a family of four staying in a vacant trailer park. Keeping in theme with the domestic turmoil between the protagonists of the original film, we learn that they are on their way to dropping their troublesome daughter at boarding school. She’s a wild child and she hates her parents and brother for no apparent reason other than teenage angst.
Rather than getting us to sympathize with the characters before throwing them into the lions’ den, the constant whining and bickering wore thin for me quickly. It feels that nearly half of the 85 minute runtime has already elapsed before they clash with the masked killers and by then I was ready for them to be sliced into ribbons.
Almost none of the slow-burn dread of the original film survives to the sequel as the killers pretty much go straight for the throat immediately. The setting, which is this perpetually-fogged vacation trailer park, feels too sprawling and ill-defined to instill the sense of claustrophobia that is greatly needed in an effective cat-and-mouse thriller. I almost want to give director Johannes Roberts credit for flipping every single thing that works about these kinds of movies on its head, but not a single aspect of it worked for me.
3/10