The Strangers: Chapter 2 (15)

Maya recuperates from her hellish ordeal in Venus County Hospital, where she learns Ryan's tragic fate and wrestles with survivor's guilt during a bedside interrogation by Sheriff Rotter and Deputy Walters. Screams echo around the hospital and Maya discovers she is trapped on her ward with her tormentors, Dollface, Man In The Mask and Pin-Up Girl, who intend to finish the torture and slaughter they started back at the cabin.

LondonNet Film Review

The Strangers: Chapter 2 (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Imagine paying for a three-course meal and waiting around a year for each course to arrive at the table. That’s the time-gated feast destined for audiences who savour this triptych of slasher horrors sketching the origins of the merciless killers first glimpsed in the 2008 home invasion thriller The Strangers. These masked menaces randomly select victims by knocking on a front door and asking unsuspecting residents if Tamara is home…

In Chapter 1 of Renny Harlin’s unholy origin trilogy, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and fiance Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) spent a night in a cabin in the woods of Oregon and blood-crazed killers Dollface, Man In The Mask and Pin-Up Girl broke into their rustic accommodation and terrorised the couple. Maya’s harrowing ordeal continues in Chapter 2, a light snack before the meaty main of Chapter 3 next year, which should serve up her much abused heroine’s vengeful retribution bloody and rare.

In the meantime, returning director Harlin and screenwriters Alan R Cohen and Alan Freedland cook up a couple of stylish but predictably flavoured set-pieces inside a hospital and outdoors in rain-lashed woods where a bizarre wild animal attack recalls Leonardo DiCaprio’s life-or-death tussle with a bear in The Revenant. Common sense goes walkabout in the middle instalment. A prolonged sequence in a morgue would be physically impossible as depicted on screen considering Maya has stitches in her abdomen that we are constantly reminded will tear if she overexerts. She does, repeatedly.

Maya (Petsch) recuperates from her hellish ordeal in Venus County Hospital, where she learns Ryan’s tragic fate and wrestles with survivor’s guilt during a bedside interrogation by Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) and Deputy Walters (Pedro Leandro). Screams echo around the hospital and Maya discovers she is trapped on her ward with her tormentors, who intend to finish the torture and slaughter they started back at the cabin.

Unsure who she can trust, Maya considers breaking for cover to seek refuge with attending nurse Danica (Brooke Lena Johnson) and her housemates Annie (Sara Freedland), Gregory (Gabriel Basso) and Neil (Pablo Sandstrom). However, every act of kindness is potentially a trap, designed to lower Maya’s defences.

The Strangers: Chapter 2 will only be of interest to fans who intend to devour all of Harlin’s set meal because this gruesome game of cat and mouse requires context to make sense. Occasional flashbacks to the opening chapter, released in May 2024 in the UK and Ireland, paper over memory lapses and recycle cheap jump scares. The single figure on-screen body count won’t induce any sleepless nights. Petsch is wholeheartedly committed to her role and wrings torrents of genuine tears as she seeks an escape from a close-knit town where everyone seems to be in cahoots.

– Kim Hu