Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 31 minutes, Director – Renny Harlin
With the masked group of strangers hunting her down with more personal anger, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) finds herself caught between escaping and taking them down from within.
It’s been suggested by producer Courtney Solomon that this trilogy of Strangers films was intended to be more of a character study of the titular killers. However, when the idea is that they’re strangers with no real motive you’d expect that to be difficult to do. Yet, as we arrive at this third and final instalment in the Renny Harlin directed story not only do we seemingly dive headfirst into the identities of the killers there’s less fear and tension than there was in the dampness of the previous instalment. It’s hard to study ‘they kill because they just do’ when you don’t go any deeper than that.
When acting as stripped back slasher flicks The Strangers franchise has worked the best, I remember liking the solid chiller that was 2018’s Prey At Night, and the first chapter of this trilogy wasn’t too bad, either. But, when things are broadened out and become something of a repetitive chase the narrative proves not quite more of the same but rather less but the same.
Madelaine Petsch’s Maya finds herself still fleeing from the group of masked killers as their anger towards her grows more personal. Yet, while they manage to kill everyone near her in constantly-cut-away-from lack of detail she manages to escape with increasing bloody gashes across her face, even if very little has happened to her. However, as more is pieced together about who the group are via multiple flashbacks, largely there to just have some more killings; failing to get into the psychopathic actions and attitudes at hand, she finds herself potentially having to get closer to them to have to take them down – see the posters and trailers where she’s hidden behind one of their masks. An idea which the film feels very unsure what it’s meant to do with it beyond it having been a good idea or image when initially assembling the story.
There’s potential for a look at random evil and the darkness that comes as part of that in The Strangers, it’s slightly in the first film but very light in the mainstream slasher vein of things. However, that potential is far away in Chapter 3 as there’s a slight hop into a very shallow puddle. Moving along with a set of repetitive and increasingly dull interactions that start to feel more copy and paste than recycled. Even the movements of the killers seem to be the same with each murder. The pattern of behaviour we see developed over the years is a monotonous one with seemingly very little development. Yet, Maya’s responses still seem completely random. Among many unfortunate consistencies in this trilogy one of the biggest had been the many utterly stupid decisions that characters have made in each of them.
The more Chapter 3 goes on, although like the previous two instalments its run-time is kept to 90-minutes, less when you take off the lengthy credits, and the more it seems to try and do with its titular group of serial killers the less it actually seems to do. It’s so caught in trying to be a direct, mainstream slasher that it doesn’t allow itself to have room for much else to happen, in a film that already doesn’t have a great deal going on. Constantly shooting itself in the foot as it moves away from the elements that at least make for more passable viewing.
An apparent character study with no character to actually study amongst the over-repeated kills and events throughout The Strangers: Chapter 3 which is both less and the same as it removes the blind, unknown evil of the titular killers.
Just A Little Bit Random 