In what may be the script’s only truly implausible contrivance, James picks the moment that the 4 a.m. She does and she doesn’t, because it’s that tingle of random, arbitrary violence-the kind that arrives out of nowhere-that gives The Strangers its narrative and thematic shape. She’s told that she’s got the wrong house. The visitor’s face is shrouded in darkness. Tyler’s anxious guilt and Speedman’s depressed chivalry combine for a genuinely melancholy tension, which gets broken by an unexpected knock at the door. He does great work with his actors, who give wonderfully natural, felt performances. Instead of loudly evoking the grindhouse style of the ’70s, a la Roth or Rob Zombie, Bertino conjures up the decade (and its horror movie legacy) in the cozily retrograde textures of the house itself, which essentially takes us back in time without actually making the film a period piece. This might seem like a deep dive into detail, but it’s the slow accrual of small, deceptively off-hand images-a tub of ice cream on the kitchen table a red record on an old phonograph-that gives The Strangers its eerie but authentic sense of atmosphere. A shot of rose petals in the bathtub becomes an emblem of dashed hopes. “It’s really nice, everything you did, it’s beautiful,” she says, observing the romantic preparations around them at his family’s summer home. A flashback explains that, earlier that evening, James had proposed to Kristen at their friends’ wedding and she had said no. The signal changes to green and the car drives on, but their mournful expressions don’t change. We first see James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler) sitting side by side in their car, their faces in the deep red glow of a traffic light. He also gives his protagonists a memorable introduction. Except that it’s also expertly staged, impressively ruthless, and-at least for me-really about something, even if that something ends up being the chilling nothing-in-particular alluded to by the masked murderess to her victim. Released in 2008 amid a deluge of stylishly deranged French, Japanese, and Korean imports, as well as a healthy flow of post-Eli Roth torture porn, Bryan Bertino’s debut looked pretty generic upon arrival, even by the standards of genre fare: another faux-authentic urban legend (“What you are about to see is inspired by true events” lies the opening title card) about a good-looking couple being stalked by a gang of killers. A sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, opens this weekend. They’re not quite the final lines of the film, but they’re the last word on why it’s endured while so many horror titles of the same early-21st-century vintage have not. This exchange from The Strangers has stuck with me for 10 years.
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