CIN3MA

"This.. table... is... so...... heavy."

Every once in a while, a movie comes along which manages to change my perspective on life, reorganize my priorities and redefine my goals. Before I delve into my updated career objectives, imagine this: after some nobody-gives-a-crap-about wedding, you’re going to a desolate yet beautiful summer house with the woman you love. You start to enjoy a romantic evening with champagne and scattered rose petals accompanied by unobtrusively catchy tunes—you start to enjoy all this when life punches you in the gut as you propose to your girlfriend and she says no…

Yes, The Strangers starts out like that. So you already start feeling disappointment, sadness and frustration before life pulls the cord on its bloody chainsaw in the form of a hard knock on the door. That’s when things start to go downhill. Combine the desolation, the tense atmosphere and the first fade-in of the intruder’s mask into the frame behind our heroine and you start re-evaluating your aims in life, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. Right then, The Strangers starts turning into a roller coaster of terrifying moments.

Fortunately, what lets my feet touch reality ground from time to time is some of the stupid things that happen in the movie, perhaps to exaggerate the horrific events. For example, the house guests are armed with a shotgun and a lot of bullets and yet the intruders, armed with their hands and knives, are not veered nor defeated. And, seriously, when I hear a knock on the door at 4 o’clock in the morning, my mind immediately occupies itself in deciding whether to drop an Insta-deuce or call 911. Come on!

The Strangers, with its many deficiencies, has one extremely effective factor—lack of motive, especially in such carnage. Unless you would like to call “Let’s start up some sh*t with some random people” a motive then I stand corrected. This brings me back to my first notion. If I were in the lead characters’ position, I would love if the ending instead showed the intruders tied up to the chairs and me standing right there… holding an AK-47… in an army uniform… with camouflage paint on my face… explaining to them how life can be an ironic bitch.