The Strangers

Well, I will freely admit that this movie made me more terrified than I have been since the 2004 presidential election.

Most people have called this a more comfortable version of "Funny Games", but as someone who is (possibly unnervingly) comfortable with repeated viewings of "Funny Games", I found "The Strangers" far more frightening. It is a basic home-invasion story, hence the Haneke comparison, but more similar in tone to Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs". Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are a feuding young couple who are attacked by masked instruders at their isolated country home after a friend's wedding. The plot essentially ends there. The use of negative space, however, does not.

The film's first-time director shows a masterful grasp of manipulating the audience through the simplest alteration of the onscreen image. Simply dropping music from many of the most suspenseful scenes subverts our horror-film expectations and makes it that much creepier when a villain is shown standing quietly in the background of a shot while the film goes on in the foreground. After all, if we were the ones standing around the dining room in flannel, smoking our cigarettes, violins on the soundtrack would not announce the arrival of an intruder. At times he lets the incidental sound do the work, such as when the arrival of a wispy blonde is heralded by what sounds like a battering ram knocking politely at the front door. We all know that whatever produced that heavy sound was not wielded by model Gemma Ward (playing the intruder).

The film is reminiscent of mid-period Hitchcock in its use of small details and everyday occurence to create its climate of dread. It deals ably with the modern horror-film question, "Why don't they just use a cell phone?" It has surprisingly little violence and seems at first to be unjustified for an "R" rating. Upon further inspection, though, perhaps this is an example of how more films should be rated. Instead of counting swear words or frames in which breasts appear, the MPAA appears to have considered the overall mood of the film and its very unsettling content. The film would be very frightening for viewers under 13, and even had this 27-year-old checking the locks twice at night. In deference to parents who might not want to spend all night reassuring terrified children, an appropriate rating has been assigned.

As for the ending, which has been criticized as pat and cliched, there is really no satisfying resolution to a film like this. Supernatural explanations for why the intruders can move so quietly and silence neighborhood dogs would have produced a feeling of disappointment in a film styled so realistically from the start. If they turned out to be a Manson-like family of real people, we would be discouraged as we learned human details about them which contradicted the fears and traits we had projected onto their tabulae rasae. Ending the film quickly and giving us as little information about the strangers as possible is the only workable compromise. It even winds up with a throwback horror cliche dating back to De Palma, and one after which the killers in "Funny Games" would turn to us, wink, and grin.

*Correction: 11:25 a.m.*: The last sentence of this post originally referred to the killers of "Funny Games" as "the heroes". While I'm sure Michael Haneke would smile wryly at that appraisal, I have changed the sentence to remove my personal value judgment from the review.