Renny Harlin’s long-form treatment of psychological and slasher horror reaches its climax with The Strangers – Chapter 3. Concluding a four-and-a-half-hour storyline is a rare feat—the recent Halloween trilogy scotched the idea when the pandemic and thematic concerns intervened—but this trilogy is nothing but committed. With all three films shot simultaneously, and Harlin and the two scripting Alans (R. Cohen and Freedland) pulling the story strings throughout, it’s certainly cohesive. The question is whether a concept like The Strangers can sustain an epic.
It’s barely been much time since Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her fiancé, Ryan, were forced to spend the night in a remote cabin just outside the small town of Venus, Oregon. Now, having seen Ryan killed and repeatedly escaping the three masked Strangers, she’s managed to kill one of her pursuers in the back of a crashed ambulance. But as her sister and brother-in-law arrive to find her, and the depth of the town’s protection for the Strangers is revealed, Maya is forced to confront how the road trip from hell has changed her.
After a quieter second chapter, Chapter 3 opens with Shelby Carter’s haunting version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ floating over the Oregon forests. A feast of sound follows—Harlin obviously having a great time matching needle-drops, periods of silence, and squelching kills to May’s travails. There’s a sense that having a feature-length runtime to explore the nature of a Final Girl has brought a new level of inspiration. It’s a step up from the repetitive middle chapter that saw Maya run into trouble after trouble as she made it from a hospital room to, well, a lane leading out of town (via a still inexplicable boar attack). While viewers can’t expect Chapter 3 to branch too far from the established formula, the path it takes might win some over.
Early in the film, Maya finds herself back at the piano for the first time since the first chapter, this time in a white chapel. The religious themes often found in Harlin’s movies bubble up in the menacing, if quite amicable chat that follows, which pretty much clears up the identity of Maya’s assailants. It’s quite a structural rug pull in the film (though not as the third act in the overall story), which sets up a closing chapter in which the families of both the Strangers and Maya orbit a twisted, homicidal love story.
That leaves The Strangers – Chapter 3 as a film of ‘buts.’ It explores the liminal space between murderer and victim, but Maya is mostly passive. It clears up a lot of hanging threads, but by no means every one (especially that raging CGI boar). But… It does attempt to do something different with this victim’s journey.
It’s almost a shame Chapter 3 is so dependent on its predecessors. Anyone wandering into this without having seen the first two chapters will be lost and likely not appreciate that it serves up some of the most interesting scenes in the trilogy. One standout set piece is a vehicular attack on Maya’s close family when Scarecrow catches up with them.
Still, Harlin’s steady hand makes sure the rules of the sequel are obeyed. The death count has been upped, and some fine gore includes an eyeball staring back from a grinder. By the time the reprise of The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ wraps things up, the cyclical ‘romance’ offers a kind of quiet satisfaction if not complete closure. Maya, the chatty, spontaneous, vital woman met in the first chapter, is now scarred, taciturn and deliberate by the time of the obligatory closing axe-work.
Considering the first film’s necessary retread of the 2008 original, Chapter 3 is the trilogy’s strongest entry. It draws together the story’s overall themes, and there’s something to be said for its attempts to inject sense into a franchise defined by senseless violence, although that’s likely to leave a lot of fans behind. Extra points then for seeing the story through, but the question of whether audiences are really interested in watching a concept like this at triple the length remains… Standing just outside the door, wearing a mask.
The Strangers – Chapter 3 is in cinemas on 6 February.
