The Stranger (Film Review) — Dread And Breakfast

The Stranger doesn’t help itself with a title that buries it deep in the mass of home invasion horrors with the same or similar name. It may warm the audience up to the subgenre, but with a slow first half, the worry is that its audience will run out the back gate well before the first mask shows up. How many strangers terrorising a family can you take? 

But Paul Gerrard and Mike Clarke’s The Stranger is a film of two halves. One side is a study of family trauma. Single mum Amanda and daughter Karli are struggling with life after the brutal murder of their husband and father during a home invasion. Moving across the country to start afresh by opening a bed and breakfast, things aren’t quite as they appear. Karli would rather be at university, with her girlfriend, somewhere with good phone signal… Then, on their first night, a stranger appears desperate to stay just one night after his car breaks down. 

It’s after the long, drawn-out set-up that things step up by getting weird. Kyle, the man who’s turned up on their doorstep with a shifting story, may be ‘the stranger’ but he isn’t the one to worry about. He’s brought something with him, a mask-clad mass of strangers with strange powers and insatiable bloodlust that never, ever stops once new quarry has joined their game. No longer all receipts, breakfasts and early starts, they’re suddenly “foxes to bloodhounds.” It threatens to be The Strangers meets It Follows.

The Stranger doesn’t quite fulfil that concept, but it adds an intriguing layer to the genre and almost explains the lengthy build-up. The first half gives us glimpses of Kafkaesque horror, with dream-like sequences and the glimmer of cosmic horror. But later, it skews into something more like The Evil Dead. 

The Stranger does a good job of shutting down any ambiguity as its relentless, implacable horror arrives at the B&B. The futile attempt to resist the mysterious evil outside lands pretty well, and takes its moment to chuck a deal with the devil in for good measure.

It’s a shame that some disconcerting, hugely effective sound design arrives with the squirming ruthless strangers outside. Occasionally muffled and buzzy, earlier scenes come across as far more amateurish than they should, and unfortunately that makes hanging around with the aftermath of domestic tragedy a bit of a slog. It’s even, well, stranger, given the experimentation and confidence in the visuals—big dips to black, overwhelming light both help conjure an atmosphere. A bit of sharpening in the sound would have left the actors less exposed as they tackle the big themes (“Stop with the happy families bullshit!”) as much as trips to the supermarket. 

Given the big swings between the two sides of The Stranger, the real miss may not be so much that it stuck with the generic title, but that it doesn’t get darker and weirder earlier. 

The Stranger is on UK digital from Trinity Content Partners now.