Don't Take Their Candy

The Strangers Written & Directed by Bryan Bertino

There is nothing scarier than a knock on the door when you’re home alone in the middle of nowhere. Nothing good can come of it, and your first instinct is generally to hover in the hallway until whoever is knocking gives up and goes away. Of course, if Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) listened to their first instinct, we wouldn’t have the sleek, stripped down new thriller The Strangers, the movie that accomplishes everything that Michael Haneke tried to do with his sadistic hostage-takers in Funny Games earlier this year.

In that film, Haneke tried to excoriate audiences for salivating over cinematic violence by denying us a catharsis and hammering home his message that violence is messy, painful and often senseless. He also employed enough smug, self-congratulatory cinematic tricks to ensure that no one watching would enjoy themselves, thus shooting his own film in its metaphorical foot. But Bryan Bertino, acting as both director and screenwriter, offers up no pseudo-intellectual bullshit. His movie, at a brisk pace and with little fanfare, terrifies us because of its ambiguity. While Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet, as the preppy psychopaths in Funny Games, teased and taunted and smirked their way through their various tortures, the three masked people who terrorize Kristen and James never show their faces to the audience. In fact, rather than bore Kristen and James to death with paragraphs of self-conscious dialogue, Bertino has Pinup (Laura Margolis), Dollface (Gemma Ward) and Man in the Mask (Kip Weeks) remain mostly silent, which adds layers of menace to what they do say; never before has “See you later” seemed so fraught with foreshadowing.

In fact, absence is mostly what makes The Strangers so tense that your legs may give out when you finally stand up. For the first third of the film, all three strangers are glimpsed only at a distance, darting into the house invisibly and leaving little clues for Kristen and James. Kristen, in particular, is almost undone by the subtle changes in rooms she’s just returned to, from a fire alarm to a missing cell phone. As these moments pile up—with plenty of door banging, car smashing and message scrawling—Bertino picks and chooses when to let the violence erupt with precision. And the first, breathtaking eruption comes not from the people who seem intent on inflicting pain, but from James, making him an unwilling accomplice in their games.

But while James turns out to be a crack shot with a gun, Kristen is barely hanging on. With nerves shredded from the psychological torture the strangers put her through while James is out buying her cigarettes, she can’t even hold a knife without slicing open her palm. But Tyler manages to sidestep the trap that Shelley Duvall fell into in The Shining, and she refrains from making Kristen a shaking, pathetic mouse, unequal to the people attacking her. She may be a mess (and frankly, who wouldn’t be with a man in a burlap sack over his head breathing heavily down our necks at five in the morning?), but Kristen is still smart enough to take advantage of her opportunities. And she’s utterly heartbreaking in the film’s climax, a devilishly good scene that does everything Funny Games promised audiences and still manages to be good cinema. Speedman, unfortunately, is saddled with the stoic, strong-man role—save a scene or two of helpless sobbing—and as a result, never has us on his side the way Tyler effortlessly does. And the three strangers, moving in that slow shuffle familiar to anyone who’s ever suffered from nightmares, are utterly mesmerizing in their calm viciousness. Any good thriller should make you worry about walking through the door and into your dark apartment, but The Strangers may prevent you from ever going home again.