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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: The Strangers

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#1 of 1 Posted 5/27/08 10:10 PM

From harveykarten Posts 798 Last Feb-7
To All [Msg # 23152.1 ]

THE STRANGERS

Rogue Pictures/ Intrepid Films
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: C
Directed by: Bryan Bertino
Written By: Bryan Bertino
Cast: Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler
Screened at: AMC 84th St.,, NYC, 5/27/08
Opens: May 30, 2008

When you were a kid, what scared you the most? If you were like me, the combination of the dark and being home alone did the trick. Who needs to pay money for a horror film when you could tremble at the thought that someone lurked in the closet when you parents went out for the evening? Bryan Bertino hooks onto to this phenomenon, except that he uses adults as the scaredey-cats and the things that go bump in the night are not just figments of an over-stimulated imagination. “The Strangers” carries its alleged frights without much dialogue, meaning that the director did not need much inspiration to write. He depended instead on photographer Peter Sova’s ability to capture three weird, masked strangers at just the right moments, editor Kevin Greutert’s talent to make the frightening figures appear and disappear as though playing a game with tenants in a luxurious, country mansion, on Tomandandy’s typically tension-producing music, and on actress Liv Tyler’s ability to cry and shriek and cry some more.

There are problems, though, that mitigate against the picture’s ability to frighten, the principal one being that Bertino elicits more unintentional laughter than abject terror. Another is a virtually whispered dialogue that opens the story that inexplicably sizes up a yuppie couple who are having problems with a relationship even as the male of the species presents his sweetheart with a diamond ring. Why wouldn’t the young man sense that his steady would state that she’s “not ready” to go forward with wedding plans?

As in Michael Haneke’s truly frightening “Funny Games”—about two psychos who imprison, terrorize and torture a well-to-do couple in their cabin and which is replete with juicy, witty dialogue—“The Strangers” wants us in the audience to put ourselves in the place of the victims, thereby leading us to shudder in our theater seats. But Bertion has stripped away both characters and locations, situating the action almost entirely within a luxurious home and the immediate outdoors, hoping that the scares would come not so much from direct action that the three masked psychos take but from the anticipation that dreadful things are about to be done.

Just as the couple are about to get it on at four in the morning, they hear loud knocks on the large, wooden door. James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) stupidly answers by opening the door, looking outside, to find no-one. When the knocks resume he asks what the visitors want. They ask for someone who does not exist—in real life the usual technique that burglars use to discover that a house is empty. This time, though, the strangers are encouraged by the fact that people are indeed in residence, but instead of hitting the phone immediately to call 911—which would presumably respond quickly given the real estate taxes that James’s family must be dishing out—he leaves his girlfriend Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) home alone for some moments while the intruders register their ability to enter the abode by shifting some objects around. A rifle makes its appearance in James’s hands, though he states he does not know how to load it, thereby raising audience tension, as we in our seats likely say, “C’mon, man, get that thing armed and use it!” The game of hide-and-seek continues.

Liv Tyler, an excellent actress best known to the youthful set for her role as Arweb in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and to a mature audience as Marilyn in “Dr. T. and the Women” (about a popular Dallas gynecologist with an upscale practice) merely pouts, cries, shrieks and shakes in “The Strangers” while Scott Speedman, a werewolf in Len Wiseman’s “Underworld” is stiff and seemingly looking back to his better lupine days. “The Strangers” offers scares of the same ol’ variety and is sadly underwritten.

Rated R. 90 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: The Strangers

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