STUDIO: Rogue
RELEASE DATE: May 30, 2008
STARRING: Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler
WRITTEN BY: Bryan Bertino
DIRECTED BY: Bryan Bertino
GENRE: Thriller
RATING: R

Would you answer the door if someone knocked at 4am? What if you were in the middle of nowhere at a secluded house? Add to it that you're in the middle of a relationship-changing fight with your significant other. What now? That's the set-up for the nightmare that takes place in The Strangers, the best thriller of the year to date and one of the biggest surprises of the season. Bryan Bertino's promising debut is likely to be swept under the rug by cosmo-swilling Sex and the City fans and people seeing Iron Man and Indy again, but this movie will outlast many of the horror and thriller cliche-fests that litter today's market. It's not perfect - very few debuts are - but it does announce the arrival of a writer/director worth watching. Perhaps the reason Rogue held on to this film for so long (it shot back in the Fall of '06) is that Bertino is clearly less inspired by recent major players in horror than he is by the classics like Romero, Carpenter, and, yes, Hitchcock. Don't mistake me, The Strangers doesn't stand up to the best from those masters but it's from the same school and that's certainly saying more than a lot of the junk that has littered the multiplex in just this year alone.

Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler star in this disturbing true story about a young couple who went to the gentleman's family home late, after a wedding, and were quickly enveloped in a nightmare. The house had been set up for a post-proposal celebration, but the problem is that the beautiful young lady didn't respond like she would in a romantic movie. So, tension greets our heroes and the audience long before the horror even kicks in. Just this initial set-up, the quiet, painful moments of a romance in crisis goes a long way in distinguishing The Strangers from its torture porn brethren. These people are instantly turned into more than just disposable victims in a Saw movie. Suddenly, a knock on the door and a strange girl asking "Is Tamara home?" At first, it's easy to write off as kids being bored kids, but that soon changes as three very creepily masked teenagers torment our hero and heroine for the rest of the long, long night.

Without giving the ending away (although, considering it's a true story, most people will and you could find it out with limited effort), The Strangers did kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth on a moral level. Should we get entertainment from the torture of two innocent people? Some will say no and it's a hard point to argue with. A well-respected friend of mine who's a critic felt that there was little "value" to a movie like The Strangers because it's essentially an exercise in torture. But are Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre much more than that? I guess what I'm saying is that there's a part of me that agrees that the very concept of a movie like The Strangers - watching evil acts done to good people with popcorn in your mouth and a drink in your hand - could understandably make your stomach turn. Know what you're getting into.

Once you do, there's a technical expertise going on in The Strangers that hasn't often been seen in the thriller genre of late and that's why it works. Most importantly, Bertino doesn't fill his script with ridiculous exclamations like "Why are you doing this?!?" Instead he allows a large majority of the action in The Strangers to happen in silence, cut by an axe going through a door or poor Liv exercising her lungs. More often than not, it's the unbelievable dialogue that pulls a movie out of the realm of believability, particularly in horror, where what people say is usually an afterthought to what they do in the writing process. If you were fighting for your life, you'd probably avoid monologues and cliched speeches. It adds a sense of realism to the first two acts of the film that can't be underestimated. And, thankfully, The Strangers never descends into gore. There's death, but it's practically PG-13 rated. Don't go expecting a bloodbath.

Only a few minor decisions here and there keep The Strangers back from true greatness. At one point, before the chaos, Speedman's James leaves to buy cigarettes and we don't go with him to the store. It dawned on me that perhaps we would never go with him and have the forced perspective of one character in one house, never knowing anything that she didn't know. Bertino almost commits to that but he pulls back. If he had put us right in her shoes, it might have elevated The Strangers to a different level of terror. There are also a few scenes here and there where the teenagers are seen in the background a la Michael Myers in Halloween. It's hair-raising to be sure, but it also has the feeling of actors in a movie trying to scare the audience instead of realistic behavior. There's also a ridiculous final shot that feels pulled from another film it's so over-the-top and unecessary. All of these criticisms might sound minor, but it's things like this that turn what could have been a four-star film into a three-star one.

Those minor discretions aside, Bertino does much more right with The Strangers than he does wrong and it's been hard to praise the thriller genre in recent years. Like so many genres before it, it takes new blood to remind us that sometimes less is more. The Strangers may not be perfect but it's easy to believe that Bertino's next few will be. It's that great a debut. And the most surprisingly accomplished one of the year.