STRANGERS ain’t Paradise

I notice many other horror reviewers are really liking THE STRANGERS. I’m not among them.

I had intended to write an early review on the OC blog, but the notes I took during the screening are in a notebook somewhere inside the office I no longer have keys for. So I’ll wing it a bit.

THE STRANGERS basically is FUNNY GAMES all over again. Well-crafted suspense in which the director refuses to give you the catharsis you seek in order to “make a point.” Michael Haneke’s point is a bit more artful than Bryan Bertino’s point, but the latter is a first-timer, after all.

I will be discussing the ending, but after the jump so you don’t have to click on it. Meanwhile, the broad strokes.

The movie begins really fucking stupidly, with a Keith David-like ominous voice telling us that this is based on true events, and gives us a few details of the supposed incident, blah blah blah. The press kit elaborates on those “true events” – when Bertino was younger, he remembered hearing about criminals who’d knock on doors asking if somebody was home. If nobody answered, they’d break in. This gave him the idea to do the opposite – criminals who break in when someone IS home, to terrorize rather than rob. True events my ass. Technically, every script is based on true events, even if those events merely involve a writer sitting at a keyboard.

The leader of the criminals dresses like Scarecrow in BATMAN BEGINS, and wheezes like Darth Vader, while his two female sidekicks (daughters, maybe? It’s left vague) wear specifically feminine masks. The victims are Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, a couple who are having issues because he just proposed and she said no. He drowns his sorrows with generic vanilla ice cream, and she with Corona, which immediately tells you he’s a dork and she’s too cool for him. But the way they act it out is impressive. I’ve always felt that both Tyler and Speedman were total pretty-face lightweights in the acting department, but Bertino brings really good performances out of them. It sounds like they were totally method about it, too, always running laps before each shot to wear themselves down emotionally.

Bertino also plays with the audience well — that “money shot” you see in the trailer works just as well in the movie, and he teases us by building up to obvious scares which he sometimes delivers exactly how you’d expect, and others throws in a curve to keep you guessing.

Unfortunately, he neglected the most important thing a horror movie needs: a good payoff. Well, maybe not neglected. He might be trying to make a point. But in doing so he pisses me off. And if that’s what he intended, like Haneke, then bravo.

SPOILERS of varying degrees follow…

The single most important thing in horror is catharsis. You jangle our nerves then give us some sort of release. Even if the bad guy wins, you have to have a moment where the hero beats the holy hell out of him and gets the upper hand (you can reverse it later as a twist if you so choose). Or maybe you side with the bad guy, a la Freddy or Jason, and the catharsis is watching them slay total dumbasses who, in movie terms at least, deserve it. Or you blow a bunch of stuff up. Or the final twist puts a different spin on everything and you see how you’ve been played, like in the SAW movies.

What you don’t do is what Bertino does here. You know that shot in all the trailers where Liv and Scott are tied to chairs, and the three strangers stand in front of them and say “Because you were home”? When you see that, it’s one of those, “Oh shit, how do they get out of this situation? I need to buy a ticket to find out!

Except they don’t get out of it. Both leads are promptly stabbed to death.

And the point? Right before doing it, the strangers take off their masks, though the shots are carefully chose so that we still don’t see their faces. Bertino seems to be telling us that even though he’s been using them like monsters, now you can see that they’re just ordinary people doing random horrific acts. Regular folks just casually destroying someone else’s world.

Another thing is that the movie begins at the scene of the crime, showing you the devastation and letting you guess what happened here. The classic directorial trick would be to somehow show us at the end that we didn’t see what we think we saw, somehow subverting the details. But not here. Looking at the initial crime scene, you can pretty much guess what happened, and be correct.

Had the couple managed to kill one of the strangers and then lost, I’d probably be happier. But the whole movie, I’m thinking to myself, “This is cool, it’s like FUNNY GAMES, but because it’s a commercial horror movie, I know it’s not gonna jerk me around. The catharsis is coming.” And it didn’t.

In other aspects of life, we call this a cock tease.