The Strangers	by M. Faust

Mind you, I ask this as someone whose love of movies began with an addiction to the fright night horror movies Channel 7 used to show every Friday night when I was a kid. But I know what I was anticipating out of those: a supernatural or sci-fi story capped by the appearance of a monster or alien designed to show off the skill and imagination of the make-up artists. In short, stuff I didn’t see in real life.

Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler in The Strangers

But the appeal of a movie like The Strangers, which I saw in a multiplex house where every seat was filled, I don’t get.

Let me start out by doing something I don’t normally do, giving away the ending: Everybody dies. Before you object, I should mention that the fact that our heroes are not going to survive is given away right at the start of the movie. Some opening onscreen text (which is also read with sepulchral gloom by a narrator, presumably for the benefit of any illiterates in the audience) informs us that FBI reports indicate a million-plus incidents of violence every year, and that the story we are about to see is based events that occurred a few years ago, the exact details of which are still unknown. Not hard to read between the lines there.

Well, okay, so what we have here is either some kind of haunted house story or a slasher variant, right? Not exactly. To a large degree, this is a very skillfully written and directed exercise in suspense by first-time filmmaker Bryan Bertino. Unlike your standard shocker, in which the victims-to-be are usually set up as young hormonal cases whose removal from the human gene pool could hardly be considered a loss, The Strangers spends an unusual amount of time presenting and building sympathy for its two protagonists.

In fact, it’s a while before we figure out just what is happening with James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler). They have arrived at a secluded rural house, decorated for a celebration, but they are clearly not in a celebratory mood. They are unhappy and uncomfortable, though clearly familiar with each other. We eventually learn that she has just turned down his proposal of marriage.

As a drama, this might seem vague, but Bertino does a terrific drama of milking tension from the setup. And he does it in a believable way. We feel like we are watching a plausible pair of characters, albeit ones who don’t always choose the smartest option. (For instance, why didn’t they just go home instead of heading for a vacation neither of them now wants?)

To cut to the chase, the house is beset by mysterious attackers. There are three of them, they are masked, and while their intents are clearly evil, they seem just as interested in toying with James and Kristen, to show them how helpless they are.

Again, Bertino does all of this with a lot of skill. It’s creepy and unsettling. But you can only manipulate an audience with these kind of tactics for so long. Eventually you have to take them somewhere. And when we get there, it is a bleak, nihilistic and utterly pointless destination.

There are reasons why we would choose to watch a story about people fighting off malign, mysterious, seemingly unmotivated attackers. They’re not always good reasons, of course. And while it may seem simpleminded to argue that thrillers like this should end with the villain being vanquished, well, it’s a simpleminded genre. The Strangers is in a lot of ways similar to the recent arthouse film Funny Games, which was also about a family in a secluded house attacked by merciless, unmotivated sadists. The difference is that Funny Games, in its unwatchably blunt way, was asking, “Why would you ever want to watch a movie like this?” The Strangers lacks even that justification.