Crew
Director – Renny Harlin, Screenplay – Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freeland, Producers – Alastair Burlingham, Mark Canton, Charlie Dombek, Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin & Courtney Solomon, Photography – Jose David Montero, Music – Justin Burnett & Oscar Senen, Visual Effects – Lipsync Post (Supervisor – Gareth Repton) & Reactor VFX (UK) (Supervisor – Ben Burrell), Special Effects Supervisor – John Smith, Prosthetics Supervisor – Ionel Popa, Production Design – Adrian Curelea. Production Company – Fifth Element/Stream Media/Sherborne Media/Lipsync.
Cast
Madelaine Petsch (Maya), Ema Horvath (Shelly/Pinup), Gabriel Basso (Gregory), Nola Wallace (Young Pinup Girl), Brooke Johnson (Nurse Danica), Richard Brake (Sheriff Rotter), Pedro Leandro (Deputy Walters), Florian Clare (Chris), Ella Bruccoleri (Jasmine), Milo Callaghan (Wayne), Joplin Sibtain (Billy Bufford), Froy Gutierrez (Ryan), Rafaella Biscayn (Eden), Rachel Shenton (Debbie), Brian Law (EMT Driver)
Plot
In the aftermath of the slaughter of her friends by the three masked strangers, Maya is taken to hospital. However, the strangers come after her to finish the job. She is forced to flee through the woods, trying to gain help from anybody she comes across, as the strangers pursue, slaughtering anybody in the way.
Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008) didn’t set any box-office records alight. It was nevertheless a superbly tense home invasion film and is considered a modern classic. The surprise is just how many films subsequently have copied its basics. There was one sequel with The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018). It was then announced that the series was going to be rebooted as a trilogy of films – the bad news is that this was to be placed in the hands of the perpetually terrible Renny Harlin (see below for Harlin’s other films). The first of these films to emerge was The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024). The Strangers: Chapter 2 was the second and was followed by The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026). The first of the reboot films made so little impression on me that when it comes to The Strangers: Chapter 2, I was struggling to remember who the characters were and what their relevance was.
The original The Strangers gave us an absolute bare minimum – all of the characters and certainly not The Strangers themselves were sketched in the barest strokes. The reboot trilogy sketches out that background. It even goes so far as to unmask The Strangers, which seems like the breaking of an unwritten rule (like showing Michael Myers without his mask or Judge Dredd without his helmet). Here Renny Harlin goes so far as to give us a Strangers origin story where we focus on the young Pinup Girl and the childhood events that shaped her into who she is. The one intriguing thing Chapter 2 does in (partially) unmasking The Strangers is to give us various scenes where heroine Madelaine Petsch encounters people but cannot be sure if they are the unmasked Strangers or not – however, Renny Harlin is not a good enough director to milk these scenes for their potential.
There is a major change in the type of story being told here. The previous three Strangers films were all works of Home Invasion. Chapter 1 started to expand things out slightly and gave us happenings around the town but still kept to the basics. On the other hand, The Strangers: Chapter 2 changes the game and essentially makes it into Madelaine Petsch being pursued through the woods by the three masked figures. This essentially now makes the film into one of the wilderness survival thrillers we have had in recent years with the likes of Alone (2020), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022), Unseen (2023), Don’t Move (2024), You Can’t Run Forever (2024) and Apex (2026), which had lone women being pursued through the woods by psychos.
Some of these survival in the woods dramas have been quite tense and harrowing. Unfortunately, with Renny Harlin in the director’s chair, everything becomes overblown and is pumped up into the ludicrous. Barely has Madelaine Petsch made it into the woods by jumping out of an SUV than she is forced to conduct unanaesthetised DIY surgery on herself to patch up a wound in her stomach. Moments after that, she is attacked and savaged by a wild CGI boar.
The rest of the film consists of Madelaine running through the woods and surrounding area encountering people, pleading help and they getting about 1-2 lines of dialogue before they are shot in the head by one of The Strangers. It is the reduction of Bryan Bertino’s suspenseful and eerie home invasion story to a story to a series of events that could be assembled in any order and it make little difference.
The Finnish born Renny Harlin first appeared in the US with his third and fourth films, Prison (1987) and A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), and then gained a modest degree of respectability with Die Hard 2 (1990), followed by a series of mindlessly spectacular action films like Cliffhanger (1993), CutThroat Island (1995), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and Driven (2001). Into the millennium, Harlin seemed to demonstrate a predilection for genre material with the likes of the ridiculously entertaining killer shark movie Deep Blue Sea (1999), the universally derided Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), the serial killer thriller Mindhunters (2004), the supernatural horror The Covenant (2006), the unsolved mystery The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013), The Legend of Hercules (2014), the Wu Xia Legend of the Ancient Sword (2018) and the killer shark film Deep Water (2026)
Trailer here