The Strangers: Chapter 3 – A Disastrous Trilogy Goes To Bed

The Strangers: Chapter 3 is the third and final instalment in the rebooted Strangers trilogy, featuring director Renny Harlin, star Madelaine Petsch, and its titular mask characters one last time. Picking up immediately after the events of the second film, Maya (Petsch) is captured by the remaining Strangers who try to indoctrinate her into their cause by forcing her to become the masked killer that she had eliminated. From there, Maya must once again to fight for her life, squaring off against the masked killers for one final time and get her revenge, all while secrets of the town and the killers themselves are revealed. Easily the best, or at least the most tolerable, entry of the trilogy thus far, that is not really saying much as it is still plenty bad in its own right.

The highlight of the ‘Strangers’ trilogy has been Petsch, and that remains the case with Chapter 3 as she continues to give it her all, especially in terms of physicality, despite the confounding choice of heavily sidelining Maya during the events of this film. Meanwhile, Basso (Gregory) and Richard Brake (Sheriff Rotter) are given larger roles in this trilogy capper, each making the most out of fairly weak material. That being said, the film does have some decently entertaining sequences to offer, including the opening scene and a later scene in a motel room being prime examples. As the franchise reaches its end, the vision of screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, and what they’ve attempt to explore across these three films, starts to become clear. For better or worse, that vision just lacks a competent filmmaker to execute it in a compelling enough way. In the end, aside from those very few positives, the film carries much of what has plagued the trilogy as a whole, delivering another effort that is just as lazy and inept as the previous two films.

Despite boasting a higher body count this time around, the film’s more brutal kills are fairly tame and unmemorable. Similarly, there is little tension, genuine thrills, or actual excitement to be had given how lazily directed it is. On the other hand, much of the horror is again built on an extreme overreliance on jump scares that miss more often than not. Finally giving audiences the answers it has been building to over the course of now 2+ films, many of them are on the predictable side and are highly unsatisfying, for the most part, offering reveals that are entirely too telegraphed early on.

Not helping its case is an odd narrative structure that saw the story constantly jumping back and forth between the past and present, offering up an unnecessary number of flashbacks that only work to spell out what is going on in detail, but somehow still creating dangling plot threads and unanswered questions by the end which seem to allude to a fourth chapter, undermining what has been billed as the final film of the trilogy. The hits keep coming as the final act of the film plays out as a complete joke, one that is both anticlimactic and ends with an abrupt whimper.

Above all else, it is truly baffling as to why this story was stretched out into a trilogy to begin with (other than for financial reasons), given the fact that the material barely sustains one film. While technically the best film of the trilogy which is, again, not saying much, the trilogy is likely to go down as one of the most disastrous the horror genre has ever seen in recent memory. In spite of this, for those who are fans of the first two installments who want to see how the trilogy concludes, they are better served waiting until it hits streaming platforms in short measure, because none of the films are worth audiences’ time or money.

still courtesy of Lionsgate/Cineplex Pictures

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Connor Carey

www.connorsmoviereviews.com/