The Strangers Chapter 2 picks up immediately after the events of The Strangers Chapter 1. Directed by Renny Harlin and written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, the film starts with Maya (Madelaine Petsch), the survivor of a brutal attack by strangers, trying to recover in a hospital room. Only, the killers haven’t been caught, and as she hears a commotion outside her door, she knows that they’re back for her.
The film follows Maya as she runs from her masked attackers, attempting to stay ahead of them. First through the hospital, then through a forest, and finally in another large home. A game of cat-and-mouse, everything about this film is about torturing Maya physically or mentally. She doesn’t trust anyone, and the killers keep closing in.
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The Strangers Chapter 2 is more of a survival film than a slasher, and that’s okay. It still utilizes simplicity to build tension, but with virtually no dialogue for such a long section of the runtime, the setting and actions have to speak louder for the audience. But they don’t.
The Strangers Chapter 2 needs you to understand its killers…for some reason.
Once Maya leaves the hospital and winds up in the forest running for her life, the film starts to double down on injury. We see her sew up her stomach, we see her handle injuries caused by being chased by an animal, and yet, all of it just feels long-winded and uninteresting.
Part of this is due to both the bad CGI used for the animal she confronts and the reality that a wild boar that big isn’t just going to nip at her legs. There is a reason hiking in Texas requires a pistol, because not much will stop a charging boar, and death is pretty much inevitable.
But you know, it’s a movie, and the heroine has to survive for Chapter 3. It’s this last part that makes everything feel devoid of stakes. Maya is getting put through the wringer and facing bodily injury after bodily injury, but she’s not going to die. So instead, we see Maya’s body broken at times, seemingly beyond repair, and she keeps hurdling forward. But it ultimately doesn’t feel like much.
Beyond just an hour of torturing Maya and showing the audience different ways to break her body but not her spirit, The Strangers Chapter 2 also works to develop the masked “strangers” throughout. Which, to be honest, goes against the spirit of the franchise. The Strangers are scary, not because of their masks, which this film seems too invested in, but because of the idea they embody.
The Strangers stop being scary when you start learning about their past.
That a person with no connection to you could brutalize you so deeply that you will either die or not recover from the trauma, you didn’t wrong them, you didn’t bring this on yourself, even inadvertently, you were just an interchangeable person.
Your life means nothing. The randomness is scary, and the lack of care about being caught is what drives it home. But all of that changes in this reboot sequel. We learn more about childhoods and identities. We start to see connections possibly forming. And I didn’t care. Why should I?
The Strangers Chapter 2 is so far beneath the original’s appeal, and it’s a true shame, given how dedicated the actors are on screen. While audiences know Madelaine Petsch as a beauty, primarily from her time on Riverdale, as Cheryl Blossom, she just doesn’t quit. She pushes past pain and claws her way through her surroundings, and it’s hard not to love her.
Petsch as a final girl is perfect. Her grit and ability to set beauty aside and embrace the blood and grime of the genre make her the one bright element of this film. Still, The Strangers trilogy is wasting her, even if it is giving her space to flex this horror muscle.
Madelaine Petsch is the best part of The Strangers Chapter 2 and a stellar final girl.
The best way to explain this film is that it’s nothing but squandered potential. The attempt to elevate the concept by allowing us to learn more about everyone involved (the victim and the killers) does more to remove tension instead of ramping it up. We don’t need to know more about anyone involved to root for Maya as she runs through the forest or grimaces as she tends to her wounds.
We don’t need to know more about the killers to worry that anyone Maya meets on her escape may be one of the masked people chasing her. We just don’t need it. Despite being a simple film, it still manages to avoid missing the point of stripping back tricks and gimmicks.
As much as I find the complete rebooting of what the franchise stood for in The Strangers Chapter 2 frustrating, the film’s largest sin is that it is just boring. For a movie that offers blood, injury, and a surprise arrow through an eye, this is just a boring movie. There isn’t much depth, there are no stakes, and every chase sequence just feels shallow to say the least.
The Strangers Chapter 2 feels like nothing. During the Q&A for the film, director Renny Harlin shared that he is currently working a supercut of The Strangers trilogy, meant to be watched in one-sitting with intermissions. And in that format, The Strangers Chapter 2 may work. But as it stands alone, this is a film with all bore, no bite, and so drastically changes the crux of the franchise that it not only feels incomplete, but also empty.
The Strangers Chapter 2 is a lot of nothing, resulting in too much down time and boredom.
The Strangers Chapter 2 continues to laugh in the face of the beloved original despite a stellar performance from its lead, Madelaine Petsch. Opening with a statistic about crimes committed by strangers across 2023, at this point in the story, none of that matters. Because a lot of this is now targeted, and as we go through flashbacks, this murder streak was not random in the least.
Perhaps it was the fact that a large section of the theater was occupied by actors hired for the social media activation. Perhaps it was because I constantly had to work my way around masked, random people clogging the already extremely narrow hallway, or when I tried to exit the building, only to have to wait for influencer after influencer as they took pictures, as the hired “strangers” lined the outdoor waiting tent.
The Strangers Chapter 2 is a film that wasn’t going to do it for me on its own merit, but the constant annoyance and clogging of areas by the actors hired to promote the film sealed its fate. While I’ll definitely give director Harlin’s final supercut vision a chance, if only for Madelaine Petsch and her dedication to a physically demanding role, everything around this screening has made it enough for me to skip the solo release of The Strangers Chapter 3.
The Strangers Chapter 2 screened as a part of Fantastic Fest 2025.
