Was I the only one who was rooting for the intruders?

This movie said it’s based off a true story so I don’t know how much character was pulled from the actual victims of this crime, or if there were victims of a crime at all, but this movie followed the two most annoying self sabotaging protagonists I have ever seen in a movie.

So it starts with the two main characters going to a cabin that is very secluded and it seems the man tried to propose but the woman wasn’t having it and thus they’re in a bad situation. They get a knock on the door at 4 am, which I don’t know why they opened it because they could just pretend to be asleep, of a random woman asking if someone was there and then this woman returns later with two other people who decide for some reason to kill them.

I wonder whether it’s a Satanic cult situation, whether it was a robbery gone wrong, but then there are no neighbours around so if they wanted to rob them they easily could. It just seemed very weird for them to kill these two people for seemingly no reason. I get that’s kind of the scary part, this could happen to anyone, but I find it frustrating not knowing what the intentions of the group were and why they were doing it.

This movie also used a lot of sound cues to make things scary. Something will fall off the shelf in another room and the music will make a scary noise and you think ‘well something just fell off the shelf that’s not scary’, or one of the characters would look out of a window and there’d be scary music but there’s not actually anything there. It was very lacklustre in terms of the horror because it relied too much on jump scares and making things scary that weren’t scary in the first place.

And as I said the main characters were just insufferable to watch. The woman just kept yelling and calling her boyfriend and just being a stupid character. They could’ve saved their lives so easily and didn’t! Why did the man go into his car that had clearly been attacked for a phone that was clearly no longer in there because it’s been attacked? Where is the logic? Why did they think the things they did would help them because it clearly didn’t?

This whole movie was quite slow, quite underwhelming, and the characters I just hated. I couldn’t get on with them at all! The intruders were interesting sure, they reminded me of The Purge, but again they didn’t hold much weight. If they wanted to kill these people they could’ve done it so easily and so quickly, and so that makes me think maybe there’s more to this story then just them going around killing people, because they seem to have a plan of attack and seem to want to elongate it as long as they could. But as an audience member I don’t know if that’s true, that’s all just my speculation.

Would I watch this movie again? No definitely not. It was slow and boring, I hated the characters, I didn’t care for their story, and while the premise is quite scary of just anyone breaking into your home and killing you, really that’s quite far-fetched for it to actually happen. I wish we got to know more about the bad guys and why they were doing this rather than them just doing it, because it really seemed to have no rhyme or reason, and that part of the plot and the story was really missing for me.

What do you think of The Strangers?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding