The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025) is directed by Renny Harlin, featuring a screenplay by Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland, and Bryan Bertino. It stars Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Matus Lajcak, Brooke Lena Johnson, Olivia Kreutzova, Richard Brake, Pedro Leandro, Janis Ahern, Ben Cartwright, Sara Freedland, Stevee Davies, Ella Bruccoleri, Froy Gutierrez, Rachel Shenton, Florian Clare, Milo Callaghan, Pablo Sandstrom, and Joplin Sibtain. Taking place immediately after the events of The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024), this sequel picks up with Maya (Petsch) as she recovers from her wounds in the local hospital. Unfortunately for her, it quickly becomes clear that the strangers have no intention of halting their brutal pursuit. Chased across town and trying desperately to survive, Maya begins to suspect that the locals might know more about the strangers than she initially anticipated. 

   Once again, Madelaine Petsch provides a believable portrayal of a woman in peril. Unfortunately, nearly everything else about the film is hilariously dimwitted, painfully cliché, or generally just pointless. Grieving from the death of her boyfriend, the script expects us to sympathize with Maya, but that’s almost impossible. The first film did absolutely nothing to make us care about their relationship, which stifles a majority of the emotional implications it’s intended to achieve. The writers seem exclusively focused on placing Maya in as many hellish situations as they can muster up, the idea being that her intense perseverance will endear her to the audience. It’s a tried-and-true approach, but it falls flat because we’re not given any real reason to care about her survival. Other than staying alive, it’s unclear what drives the character. Sure, general survival being a protagonist’s sole motivation is realistic, but this isn’t real life. There’s nothing unique about having a survival instinct, and it’s pretty the only thing we learn about her. We need to know more about why she wants to survive beyond instinct. Does she have any (alive) loved ones? Does she want to take some kind of revenge? It doesn’t need to be complicated, but viewers require better characterization than “she’s human and does exactly what most humans would.”

This script further fails Petsch by giving Maya multiple “what are you doing, you idiot!” moments. Most of these are easy enough to ignore, considering that I had low (or zero) expectations going in. That being said, I couldn’t help but facepalm when Maya jumps into the back of a local’s car with one of the killers pursuing close behind, but immediately shifts her suspicions to them when they lock the doors. I’m pretty sure locking the doors is what you’re supposed to do when there’s a killer outside.  

Nearly every supporting character feels undercooked to the point that certain reveals/surprises fall completely flat. For example, the film culminates in one of its killers being unmasked, and it’s clear their identity is intended to be a big surprise. The issue is that the film does absolutely nothing to establish who they are before this reveal. Even the flashbacks involving this individual fail to achieve any kind of meaningful characterization. They’re essentially just used as a tool to explain some of the franchise’s looming mysteries. 

The beauty of the original Strangers film, no matter how simple it may be, is that it seems to relish the idea of killers whose motivations are kept mysterious, or were nonexistent to begin with. I think it’s safe to assume that in real life, most serial killers don’t provide their victims with a Scooby-Doo-style villain where they spill the beans. This gives the film a similar effect to the closing shots of Halloween (1978), terrifying the audience with the idea that this kind of violence could (and does) happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone. The world still doesn’t fully understand why such evil occurs, a fear of the unknown that the original film capitalizes on better than most. This causes me to be dumbfounded by Part 2’s decision to answer some of the original’s most iconic elements of lore, most of which are intentionally left deliciously vague. I don’t love it when franchises do this, but this is particularly egregious. This is like the equivalent of the Saw writers deciding, “You know what would be a great idea? Let’s stop showing any kind of gore in our movies.” 

Overall, this is one of the crappier horror sequels in recent years, a somewhat surprising development considering how bad the original is. The experience just kind of feels like a crappy ripoff of the already crappy Halloween 2 (1981) that leaves its hospital setting halfway through just to return to the location where the previous film took place. The characters are also underwritten, and the kills are lazily conceived to the point where this 90-minute film seriously features two of the same kill, one that’s painfully generic anyway. Also, I’m kind of trying to actively block out the film’s random, The Revenant (2015)-style attack sequence that sees Maya harrowingly mauled… by a pig? This entire experience just feels like eating the same shit sandwich I was tricked into eating last year, except this time it tastes worse. I would go into further explanation, but I’ll leave that to the film’s creative team. Explaining everything (even what you’d rather keep vague) appears to be their area of expertise. D