Dir: Renny Harlin. With: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Richard Brake, Rachel Shenton. 91 mins. Cert: 15
If you’re wondering how this shrug-along horror series has got this far, Renny Harlin shot all three instalments back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022; reshoots followed the indifferent response to 2024’s first chapter, which didn’t much alleviate the even more indifferent response to last year’s second. We were getting them whether we wanted them or not: the modest resources had been spent, one and two were cheap enough to make some sort of money, and so we now arrive at the last knockings and the year’s most dutiful carnage. The mistake was to expand a morally gloomy universe that was better off self-contained; the more light Harlin and collaborators let in, the more their set-up presented as generic runaround, hopelessly out of place amid the recent horror renaissance.
We’re deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Campbell moment) continues to scurry about a devout woodland community like a bloodied fieldmouse with resting iPhone face; those masked thrill-killers – previously three, now two – have gained ulterior motives for pursuing her. Also present: tatted survivor Gregory (Gabriel Basso, who must have been hoping for more to do) and the ever-shifty Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), whose link to the killers is finally made explicit here. New blood arrives in the form of Maya’s sister Debbie (Hollyoaks alumna and recent short-film Oscar-winner Rachel Shenton) who comes to town seeking answers, only to be drawn into another round of humdrum stalk-and-slash.
Somewhere in the background is the unnerving (and not untimely) idea of an all-American community that tolerates killers in its midst so long as they prey on outsiders, protecting their own. Yet Harlin ties up his loose ends in characteristically leaden, workmanlike fashion. His scene pacing might have seemed antiquated circa Wes Craven’s Scream; a full thirty minutes of pregnant pauses hardly shake the suspicion there wasn’t enough plot in play for a trilogy. The 2008 original will probably endure as a solid, sleepover-ready example of American ordeal cinema – but this final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, a plastic bag being propelled through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is now showing in selected cinemas.
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