'The Strangers: Chapter 3' review: Meandering slasher saga ends with a whimper

Courtesy of Lionsgate

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I imagine the creators of 2008’s sleeper hit “The Strangers” never envisioned that nearly two decades later their lean, terrifying premise would be stretched into a trilogy of meandering and creatively bankrupt sequels. The original worked because of its brutal simplicity: a trio of masked stalkers terrorize a couple for no other reason than the chilling line, “They were home.” That randomness was the point. There was nothing to explain, nothing to expand, and certainly nothing that demanded a bloated cinematic universe.

Yet writer-director Renny Harlin apparently saw franchise potential where there was none, culminating in the vile and mean-spirited “The Strangers: Chapter 3,” a finale forced to untangle a web of half-baked plot threads established in the prior films. Like “The Strangers: Chapter 1” and “The Strangers: Chapter 2,” this installment feels less like a story worth telling and more like an obligation nobody asked for. Scenes play like placeholders, characters drift without purpose, and the entire enterprise feels assembled on the fly rather than crafted with any genuine creative intent.

Shot back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022, Harlin reportedly tried to recalibrate “Chapter 2” after the muted reception to “Chapter 1,” which did respectable business by modern slasher standards but clearly failed to ignite any real audience enthusiasm. The problem was never marketing or timing. Expanding this already thin premise into a sprawling franchise was misguided from the start. Nobody who watched “The Strangers” in 2008 was clamoring for elaborate mythology or convoluted backstories for the killers. The terror came from the unknown. Now we are saddled with childhood traumas, recruitment pipelines into a murder cult, and detailed explanations for how these villains have avoided consequences for years. It is the cinematic equivalent of explaining a joke until it dies.

By “Chapter 3,” the audience is buried under layers of unnecessary lore. Maya, played by Madelaine Petsch, remains the lone bright spot, gamely fighting through material that gives her little more to do than run, scream, escape, and inevitably get captured again. After surviving “Chapter 1,” escaping a hospital in “Chapter 2,” and even wrestling a wild boar at one point, she is once again trapped in a repetitive cycle that robs the film of suspense. Instead of escalating stakes, the narrative simply repeats itself, mistaking motion for momentum.

Returning survivors include Gregory, played by Gabriel Basso, whose exhausted performance suggests an actor painfully aware of the material he is trapped in, and Sheriff Rotter, played by Richard Brake, whose connection to the town’s sinister underbelly finally comes into focus with all the subtlety of a flashing neon sign. New additions such as Maya’s sister Debbie, played by Rachel Shenton, exist largely to wander through scenes asking obvious questions while surrounded by townspeople who telegraph their guilt with cartoonishly bad poker faces. When a waitress ominously declares that “people always go missing, but they are never FROM here,” the film seems convinced it has delivered a shocking revelation rather than a tired horror cliché.

Ultimately, “The Strangers: Chapter 3” confirms what the previous installments already suggested: there was never enough narrative meat here to justify even one sequel, let alone an entire trilogy. The film sputters along, desperately trying to connect scattered ideas into something resembling a coherent finale, but the result feels redundant, joyless, and creatively hollow. Harlin gestures toward themes about societal neglect and the dangers of insular communities that enable evil, but these ideas are buried beneath clumsy exposition and repetitive chase sequences.

Despite a frantic attempt to tie up loose ends with forced efficiency, the legacy of the original “Strangers” remains intact precisely because it knew when to stop. This trilogy, on the other hand, feels like an echo that faded long before the final credits rolled.

Grade: D- 

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 3 is now playing in theaters.