Philadelphia Weekly

When the lights came up at the end of The Strangers, a grim and depressingly hollow technical exercise from first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino, a colleague sighed: "Just what we needed--a remake of Funny Games without the joy."

Alas, if only this grisly, undeniably well-made film were even half as infuriatingly pedantic or crazily ambitious as Michael Haneke's recent hectoring wallow. Instead The Strangers is more like Bertino's demo reel disguised as a movie. Reworking last year's equally empty French/Romanian thriller Them into a slightly more Hollywood- friendly pattern, this nasty little number is a grab-bag of nifty widescreen compositions and sound design stingers, with nothing on its mind besides its own virtuosity.

It does begin quite promisingly, with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman arriving at one of those lovely secluded cabins way out somewhere in the middle of the woods that you only ever see in the movies. The place has been tricked out for romance, with rose petals in the bathtub and champagne on ice, but our couple couldn't appear less thrilled to be together. Their overconsiderate interactions are embarrassingly strained, and only gradually do we discover that earlier in the evening Tyler rejected Speedman's marriage proposal.

Bertino's filmmaking is impressively terse. The empty champagne flutes, flickering candles and melting ice cream work as visual mockeries, rubbing salt in Speedman's broken heart. But then comes a thunderous knock at the door, echoing through the theater in deafening digital surround sound, and everything goes straight to hell.

There's a large man wearing what appears to be a burlap sack on his head--a couple of hollow eyes cut out. Two diminutive women are at his side, one wearing the mask of a porcelain doll, the other in a slightly more sexed-up version of the same. For reasons that are never even hinted at, the three spend the rest of the movie relentlessly tormenting and terrifying our unhappy couple. And that's all, folks. So much for character development, and forget about any plot twists. There's no subtext here. Heck, there's barely even any text--just a ton of icky set-pieces strung together by a thread.

The annoying part is, Bertino can really direct. Diligent students of early John Carpenter pictures, he and cinematographer Peter Sova make excellent use of the extra-wide CinemaScope frame, cannily turning background and foreground planes of action against one another in expert fashion. The movie's most genuinely creepy sequence finds Tyler fussing in the kitchen, completely oblivious to one of her unexpected visitors lurking silently, way off in the far corner of the screen. Bertino stews for an agonizing eternity in the icy chill of that image, relishing our discomfort.

The Strangers offers several moments like that one, proving once again that well-thought-out compositions and an understanding of cinematic grammar will trump fancy editing trickery or F/X flourishes every time. A simple darkened hallway and the ominous drone of Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" on the cabin's record player conjure stomach-churning dread.

But to what end?

Tyler and Speedman don't get to do much besides whimper and run. Carpenter's Halloween is an obvious touchstone for the filmmakers, but you won't find any of Jamie Lee Curtis' final-girl spunk in Tyler's quivering wreck. The couple's constant abject helplessness makes the proceedings awfully queasy, not to mention monotonous.

An ill-advised prologue offers statistics about violent crime in America, a pathetically transparent attempt to graft unearned sociological import onto the movie's arbitrary sadism. When asked why they're doing this, one of the strangers responds: "Because you were home." I guess this is supposed to be read as some sort of nihilistic nightmare logic, but it feels more like an admission of creative bankruptcy on the screenplay front.

The Strangers is the more infuriating because the talented Bertino clearly knows how to make a movie. If he ever figures out the why, we'll have someone to watch.