film, eyeballs, brain

It’s a little dispiriting when you realize, about fifteen minutes after you pop in the video, that the thoroughly unremarkable movie you’re watching is essentially a remake of another thoroughly unremarkable film. The movie in question is Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, which seems awfully similar to the forgettable 2006 French horror movie Ils.

Here’s the setup: there’s Liv Tyler and some guy. (Okay, his name is actually Scott Speedman.) There’s a bit of a backstory — he’s just proposed to her, and she’s refused — but this has little relevance to what follows. Welcome to the home invasion hour: the young couple are menaced by masked strangers outside the house, there’s a lot of running around, and we finally come to the inevitable ending.

It doesn’t help that Liv and her beau aren’t particularly competent in defending themselves — it’s closer to reality, I’m sure — but it prevents the viewer from any kind of heroic identification with them. Or from caring, really. (They have a great record collection though — “The Milk-Eyed Mender” and “Mermaid Avenue” on vinyl!) With relatively little violence, The Strangers (like Ils) owes much of its atmosphere to ambient sounds: creaks and knocks and whispers from the walls. But sound design is hardly a hook to hang a hat from, much more an entire (mercifully short) horror movie.

I suppose there’s something to be said for this kind of minimalist, no-frills horror, filmed almost in real-time, with practically only two characters and one setting. Working within these constraints is admirable, and I suspect that the movie’s defenders figured it was a refreshing change from the splatter of the Saw / Hostel franchise.

The problem is that this restraint seems to also have relieved the filmmakers from the burden of providing anything close to narrative or character development. The plot, if one could call it that, simply consists of running into rooms and running out of them. At least in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs we had some ideological hoohah about American masculinity; there’s really nothing at stake here, except maybe Tyler’s bankability as an actress.

When it’s done right — as in Nimrod Antal’s Vacancy — it works effectively, but not here. For instance, the masked strangers continually appear ominously behind our protagonists, but for absolutely no reason. One figures that all this random hovering is meant to tell the viewer that the protagonists are being toyed with. But since the strangers’ appearances are of no consequence — Tyler and that other guy are almost always facing the other way when they show up anyhow — the scenes end up deflating whatever little tension is present. You might gasp the first time one of the strangers appears (“Omigod he’s in the house!!!”), only to realize that it doesn’t matter (“Oh look, there’s the masked guy again.”).

We slowly begin to understand, with the weary repetition of these scenes, that there’s not much point to why one character runs into the barn, or why the lights are turned on and off, or why this is all happening in the first place. We do get an answer of sorts in the nihilistic conclusion, but why bother? Life’s too short; read a book.

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