The Strangers.

"The Strangers doesn't take many words to describe," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "isolated vacation home. Masked tormenters. Helpless couple. And yet it's precisely the film's spare, disciplined, back-to-basics horror effects that lend it a sustaining chill."

"Claiming inspiration from true events, The Strangers builds tension with tiny details - a moved cellphone, a looping song on the record player - and empathy with victims whose intimacy is affectingly real," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Like Nimród Antal's recent Vacancy, this highly effective chiller suggests that a relationship in extremis is the most honest of all."

Updated through 6/4.

"Tight, intense, often legitimately frightening, and committed to its suburban-nightmare premise, The Strangers may not be gory, but I wouldn't wish it on too many kids under fifteen," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "It's a classical, no-frills, 85-minute blast of cold air, a refreshing bit of professionalism in a genre whose mainstream, at least, has been plagued of late by lazy pandering and general shoddiness."

"When the lights came up at the end of The Strangers, a grim and depressingly hollow technical exercise from first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino, a colleague sighed: 'Just what we needed - a remake of Funny Games without the joy.'" Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

But Dennis Harvey, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, finds that "The Strangers makes excellent use of eerie restraint and quiet in a long, tense buildup before most of the real mayhem happens. Too bad the last five minutes are as uninspired as the prior 80 are crafty."

And in the Voice, Ed Gonzalez finds that "Sometimes avoiding the synapse-raping bad habits of splat packers Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja is its own reward; doing so without also submitting to Michael Haneke-style hand-slapping is nearly monumental."

Mark Peikert sees the Funny Games parallel, too: "But Bryan Bertino... offers up no pseudo-intellectual bullshit. His movie, at a brisk pace and with little fanfare, terrifies us because of its ambiguity."

"The biggest problem is that all the pay-offs to the deliberate build-up are telegraphed well in advance of the action," writes Peter Martin at Twitch. "I saw this with a full house at an advance promotional screening, and there were big screams at the first scare - which I won't give away - but then each time that same trick was subsequently used, the returns were diminished. There is simply no suspense when you know what's coming."

"Bertino has the pretensions of an artist and the indelicacy of a hack," writes Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe. "He tries to get under our skin with a pile driver."

"[Liv] Tyler and [Scott] SpeedmanThe Strangers has them playing, essentially, meat puppets," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Starring in this movie isn't doing them any favors, and buying a ticket for it won't do you much good, either."

"Though at times predictable and overcalculated, The Strangers takes some sincere risks in fucking around with our expectations," writes Jonathan Busch in Vue Weekly. "And that makes me feel, well, appreciated."

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov has a good talk with University of Texas alum Bertino.

Update, 5/31: ""Inspired by true events" may be the best thing to happen to horror movies since the invention of the chain saw," writes the Chicago Tribune's Jessica Reaves. But "Bertino's taut, spare thriller is plenty scary without relying on pseudo-historical context... [T]his is an enormously unsettling movie."

Update, 6/4: "If The Strangers has any real or lasting appeal (it made $21 million its opening weekend), it will of course be on DVD, where, as if in some kind of William Castle promotion, the viewer is seeing the film in a vulnerable context that replicates that in the film itself," notes DK Holm at the Vancouver Voice.

Posted by dwhudson at May 30, 2008 7:29 AM