Jonah Naplan   September 27, 2025

The most surprising thing about the otherwise dull and filler “The Strangers: Chapter 2” is that it’s not awful. As somebody who’s been a longtime hater of this slasher franchise, I’m somewhat happy to report that I did not repent every minute of my time with the newest “Strangers” movie. It isn’t necessarily “good,” but it’s better than “Chapter 1” in every way.

The movie opens almost immediately where the last one left off. Maya (Madelaine Petsch) wakes up in the hospital, having just survived an attack by the trio of The Man in the Mask, Pin-Up Girl, and Dollface. Her fiancée Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) wasn’t so lucky. The first 15 minutes of “Chapter 2” are a series of flashbacks to help get viewers up to speed with what’s going on. The horrors of the home invasion are once again felt in full force as the movie replays snippets from that ending scene over and over again. As the fourth movie in this franchise, it’s kinda baffling that this is actually the first one to be a direct continuation of any of the other films.

Reportedly, director Renny Harlin (“Die Hard 2”), working with writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, shot this entire trilogy of “Strangers” prequels back to back to back, and apparently one 260-page script was originally written, ultimately split into thirds. In this one especially, you can feel the strain in stretching a basic concept out to three movies. The biggest battle that “The Strangers: Chapter 2” fights is justifying its existence. If the first one was just an awful rehash of an already not-great movie, and the third will presumably be the “big finish,” then this one just feels like a hollow middle, biding time without any particular aim or direction.

Quite literally everything about “Chapter 2” had some potential. The idea that the entire movie is just one extended chase scene could have been thrilling if the filmmakers were willing to put more effort into the pacing. After a decent enough setpiece in the practically abandoned hospital where Maya narrowly escapes the Strangers again and again, she’s tossed out onto the road, hopping from location to location, hitchhiking here, sleeping there, always unsure who to trust. There’s an interesting version of “Chapter 2” trapped inside the 98-minute runtime that focuses more on Maya’s paranoia and how the shadiness of everybody she meets leads us to believe that anyone could be the Strangers. Instead what we get is a messily contrived sequence of events that are all ridiculously illogical and only serve to transport a character from point A to point B. An attack by a wild boar (no, I’m not joking) in the middle of the movie is the most obvious evidence that the filmmakers completely ran out of ideas, and needed to come up with something to pad out the runtime.

If “The Strangers: Chapter 2” finds any success, it’s because of two factors. The first is Petsch, who feels like the only real person in this transactional movie. Everybody else, from the group of people she meets on the road, including the sketchy Gregory (Gabriel Basso), to the Sheriff of this small town (Richard Brake), is off-kilter not because they’re supposed to be but because it doesn’t feel like there’s a real human being playing them. Petsch has actual talent when it comes to the scary scenes and she understands the rubric for a slasher heroine—scream a lot, be somewhat smart and resourceful, but not too much because you have to make some stupid decisions, too—but the thin script never fully appreciates what she has to offer. The second saving grace is actually the story; “Chapter 2” is the first “Strangers” movie to date that doesn’t follow the same formula as the others (a family settles down in a rural location, a little girl knocks on their door and asks for somebody they don’t know, and then the Strangers invade the scene, killing everybody they can). That “Chapter 2” abandons this template and moves around from location to location makes it, I suppose, slightly less predictable than all the movies that came before it.

And yet, the strangest (yes, pun intended) thing about “Chapter 2” is that it tries to give motivations to the Strangers who were only ever scary because we didn’t know their identities or why they did what they did. The movie opens with a statistic about how many people were the victims of randomized killings in 2023, and then proceeds to give us a hammy back story about the murderers. It’s a decision that defeats the whole thrust of the franchise, and makes us wonder how much more will be ruined in the third movie. By the end of this one, you might not even want to see it.

Now playing in theaters.