Back in 2008, as horror was leaning into torture porn and found footage, The Strangers came along with a quietly haunting premise that took its time and left the audience genuinely unsettled, despite its simplicity. The idea of a group of masked killers tormenting a couple simply because they were home was unnerving and hit on very real fears that someone might be creeping in the shadows, waiting to attack — and to make it even worse, just for the hell of it. The Strangers was a breath of fresh air at a time when the genre was trying to gross out the audience as much as possible.
Last year, Renny Harlin, director of such films as Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea, and notorious flop Cutthroat Island, released the first of a planned trilogy reboot with The Strangers: Chapter 1. With Chapter 1, Harlin managed to essentially make a worse version of The Strangers, turning it into a brainless slasher with no tension and without the underlying dread that made the original film work as well as it did. To put it mildly, this reboot trilogy was off to a bad start. Yet Harlin has somehow sunk to a new low for this franchise with The Strangers: Chapter 2, a film that is a complete miscalculation of what made these movies terrifying and interesting in the first place.
What Is ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’ About?
From the very opening, The Strangers: Chapter 2 doesn’t make sense. The film opens with a statistic about how many murders are random acts of violence committed towards strangers. But after Chapter 1, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) is no stranger to the masked man and two masked female accomplices who killed her fiancé, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), in front of her and left her for dead. In fact, after news breaks at the local diner by Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) that Maya is still alive and in the hospital, it doesn’t take long before this trio of masked murderers is hunting Maya down to finish the job.
Over the longest 98 minutes you’ve ever felt, Maya escapes the clutches of these three over and over, occasionally finding someone she believes she can trust to help her, only to have them either killed by the murderers or suspected by Maya of actually being the killers. As Maya tries to make her way to safety, no one will talk or act like a real human being; every decision is almost impressively stupid, and you’ll question more than once how this story has been stretched to the obscene point that it had to be told over the course of three films.
‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’ Doesn’t Understand What Made the Original So Compelling
Harlin and writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland — who also wrote Chapter 1, and strangely, co-wrote the Robert Downey Jr./Zach Galifianakis road comedy Due Date — seem to have looked at The Strangers and said, “Hey, what if we remade this, but torpedoed anything that worked?” Right out the gate, Chapter 2 is no longer an act of random violence; it’s a direct attempt to hunt down Maya, a loose end that they need to clean up. In that original film, the trio of murderers felt like flesh-and-blood maniacs who played by the rules of logic and time. As with Chapter 1, this second chapter turns them into your basic, boring movie serial killer, who can pop up at any time, yet still often manages to make the dumbest choices whenever they’re relatively close to our protagonist.
OK, but what about the sense of dread, you might ask? Naturally, it’s nonexistent here. Harlin seems to think that making this story laboriously slow is the same as steadily building tension. Scenes go on for far too long, and basically equate to Maya taking her time to find a hiding spot, a killer comes in, and at the worst possible time, she makes the slightest noise. The killer then gets distracted, moves on, and this all plays out over and over again. It’s as though Harlin, Cohen, and Freedland were aware that the most effective part of Chapter 1 was the tense crawlspace sequence, in which Maya had to be quiet after accidentally getting a nail through her hand while crawling, so they decided to continuously recreate that moment without any of the excitement or fear. Chapter 2 doesn’t put you on edge, but it does think if it dully plods through every scene, it’ll have the same impact — bad news: it actually has the opposite effect.
Yet you might ask, surely, the anonymity of these killers causes some excitement, right? Especially since Maya meets characters who could potentially be the killers?? Absolutely not, no. The characters Maya meets are either too obviously not the killers, or they’re so ridiculously over-the-top (as we see with the wildly exaggerated performance by former J.D. Vance, Gabriel Basso). Even more ludicrous is that Chapter 2 decides that what this trio of killers really needs is an origin story, as we cut back to their childhood. Again, if part of the inherent terror of The Strangers is that they could be anyone attacking for no reason, explaining who they are completely negates that.
Somehow, ‘Chapter 1’ Is Even Worse Than ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’
It’s also wild how out of his depth Harlin is as a horror director here. In one scene, Maya has to stitch up her wounds that have opened back up after running like a maniac from both killers and people trying to help her. This should be a layup for Harlin; people having to stitch themselves in movies is an easy way to make audiences cringe in their seats. Yet somehow, he even messes that up, as the scene makes the stitching hard to see, even blocking it with Maya’s hand at one point. Countless other films have done this scene well — it doesn’t take much to make a moment like this uncomfortable — but Harlin can’t even make that work.
Cohen and Freedland’s script is often laughable in how absurd this story plays out. Every choice that is made is a bad one, every moment is interminable, and there’s absolutely no fear or curiosity as to who these killers are. Not since Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy has one story felt so stretched out over three films in a way that felt completely unnecessary. When the film tries to summarize the events of the first film, it only takes a few quick sentences, in case you need evidence of how little happens in these films. But at least with Chapter 1, they could fall back on retelling the story of 2008’s The Strangers. Here, they’re completely unmoored when having to come up with their own story in this universe. At one point, Chapter 2 feels the need to introduce a gigantic wild boar to terrorize Maya. And if that’s not bad enough, we even get a flashback to the boar’s origin. It’s as though Chapter 2 is throwing everything at the wall to see what works, other than, you know, playing to what made the first film a solid horror.
At the very very least, Madelaine Petsch is doing the best she can with an extremely weak script and a director who can’t handle horror. She gives an effective performance that plays into the tension of the scene and shows us the emotion that we should be feeling while watching the film. If the movie could match the terror that Petsch is presenting here, this trilogy would stand a chance.
But The Strangers: Chapter 2 is an exhausting bastardization of where this story began in 2008. No one seems to remember why The Strangers worked, and instead, tries to water this concept down with terrible pacing, villain (and boar) origins, and extremely stupid choices made at every turn. It’s a shame all three of the films in this trilogy were filmed together, as at this point, it would be hard to imagine how Chapter 3 could right this sinking ship. The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a true disaster, one of the worst horror films of the year, and it’s a damn shame this is what this franchise has come to.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is now playing in theaters.
- Release Date
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September 26, 2025
- Runtime
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96 Minutes
- Director
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Renny Harlin
- Writers
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Alan Freedland, Alan R. Cohen, Amber Loutfi
- Producers
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Courtney Solomon
- Sequel(s)
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The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2025)
- Franchise(s)
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The Strangers
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Richard Brake
Sheriff Rotter
- Madelaine Petsch does what she can to make the horror of this experience palpable.
- The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a mishandling of everything that made the 2008 original worthwhile.
- Every character and every choice they make is truly ludicrous.
- Chapter 2 has no idea how to build tension.
- The decision to give the villains a backstory is appalling dumb.
