The Strangers: Chapter 2 - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

The Strangers: Chapter 2



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
Ugg, as a huge fan of the original The Strangers with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, AND a fan of Renny Harlin’s works during the 80s and 90s, it gives me no joy to give this series a thumbs down. I LOVED The Strangers when it came out in the early 2000s, as it was a taut and tense thriller that doubled down on the fact that you didn’t need to say a lot to develop tension. Just have a couple stranded somewhere and some lunatics come in and wreak havoc. No backstory, no trying to humanize the villains. Just masked evil doing what evil does. But at the same time, the whole “home invasion” genre is a bit weak on having sustaining legs for very long, as the genre wore itself out pretty quickly. And frankly, wit was done to death in the 70s and 80s as well. It’s just that enough time had passed that the horror subgenre was able to rise once more. But Renny Harlin’s attempt to reboot a movie that never needed a reboot has so far fallen pretty flat on its face.

Penned as a trilogy, the Harlin reboot series had all three films filmed back to back a few years ago, opting to release one film a year for the last 3 years. The original film took the general premise of the 2008 film and ran with it, introducing a new couple out in a mysteriously rural cabin where three masked killers strike (dubbed Pin Up Girl, Dollface, and Scarecrow due to the masks they wear). Barely escaping with her life (and presumed dead by the killers), young Maya (Madelaine Petsch) barely makes it into town,n where she is hospitalized for her wounds. But it seems that the killers have ties to the town, because as soon as Maya is found out by the locals to be alive, the three masked killers once more arrive to cause mayhem and torture.

The second act of the trilogy falls prey to the typical dip in quality between the first and 3rd acts (being that all three films are one singular story, each film acts as one of the three acts in the narrative), with the sequel acting as nothing more than a setup for the finale 3rd film. The film is much less a home invasion movie than your typical 80s slasher, with Maya running for her life from the knife-wielding killers, with Scarecrow and his twin female accomplices slicing and dicing their way through anyone who happens to end up between them and Maya. And in typical slasher fashion, Maya actually ends up exposing the identity of one of them (whom we saw in the first film).

Weakening the story even more is the continuation of heavy flashbacks, which don’t seem to make much sense for the first half of the movie, only to reveal that they are the origin story of the main killers. It explains how they got to where they are, and what events in their childhood formed them into psychopathic killers. And frankly, it doesn’t do a good job at it either. Almost as boring and bland as the rest of the narrative, it just feeds us obvious setups for the “evil children” trope that would later become evil adults. And the same goes for the rest of the story. Maya runs from one area to the next, with the killers hot on her heels as they kill everyone that she takes refuge with. Rinse, repeat, move on to the next one.

And kind of like John Wick 3 and 4, the 2nd movie starts to lose its momentum when it expands upon its lore and delves into the past lives of the killers. A good killer needs a backstory when it's a horror film like this. In many ways, it actively stifles the tension in a horror film, keeping the mysteriousness and terror at bay by rationalizing how these people got here. Sure,n a single flashback that gives you an “ahhhh, gotcha” moment is one thing, but stretching it out over the course of a whole film (let alone a trilogy) just takes any weight and sense of ominous terror from the villains.

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Rated R for strong violence, language, and sexuality




4K Video: Video:
Being that all three chapters were filmed back to back, the video score for all three films is going to be pretty much identical. It features the same dark and moody atmosphere as the first, with light blue and sepia tones pushing through depending on the location. Browns, black,s and ambers show up nicely, while typical bright shiny primaries are a bit muted and dulled here. Black levels are HEAVILY intrinsic to the visual look, and they come through well with the Dolby Vision enhancements. Shadows show off great detail levels, as does the fine detailing in the daylight sequences (as few as those are). I noticed some shots tend to show background focus a bit blurry, but that has been the case for all three films, and seems to be a stylistic choice by the cinematographer rather than an artifact. And speaking of artifacts, outside of that soft out-of-focus look in some backdrops, I noticed no artifacting whatsoever. No banding, major crush, or anything else out of order. The whole image just looks great.t


Audio:
The Dolby Atmos track is a stellar mix, though slightly constrained and toned down from how it could be due to the claustrophobic nature of the story. Everything is in tight hospital corridors, inside of morgues, and in tight and tiny rooms with someone trying to hack their way in. When the film opens up and goes outside, things get a bit more spacious, with the sound of a wild boar attacking from the rear, or horse hooves and neighing coming from the sides and back of the room. Bass is intense and powerful, adding a lot of thump and boom to the jump scares, but it also knows when to shift into the background and be subtle. The score flows nicely throughout the entire mix, and dialog is great for the most part. But I did have a hard time hearing some stuff just due to how much whispering goes on in the film.


Extras:
• Heart of a Killer: Making The Strangers- Chapter 2 (RT 19:05)
• Q&A with Cast & Crew (RT 42:52)
• Theatrical Trailer

Final Score: ​

Ultimately, The Strangers: Chapter 2 left me feeling let down and disappointed. The first chapter wasn’t that great to begin with, but the sequel definitely suffered from a dip in storytelling, as well as becoming very rote and overly well-trodden. The original film from 2008 built suspense and tension, while this one works more accurately as a typical slasher film, just without that many good kills. The violence is brutal and dark, but never really given the sort of gleeful excitement and focus that a true slasher thrives upon. Instead, they seem to be almost glossed over, or edited in a way where the violence seems less brutal than it really could have been. The 4K UHD from Lionsgate looks and sounds great, and we have a few legacy extras from the Blu-ray as well. All in all, just like the first chapter, I would leave this as a low rental on a Friday night, and not a blind buy.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Richard Brake
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Written by: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland, Bryan Bertino
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Core), Spanish, French DD 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Studio: Lionsgate
Rated: R
Runtime: 98 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: November 3rd, 2026

Recommendation: Low Rental