‘The Strangers: Chapter 3’ Movie Review: Time-Wasting Finale Lacks Suspense And Reward
Photo from Lionsgate
From Jeremy Kibler
Experiments can sound great in conception, until the execution happens. Between 2024’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 and 2025’s The Strangers: Chapter 2, director Renny Harlin’s consecutively shot reboot trilogy now concludes with, you guessed it, The Strangers: Chapter 3. While the first film was a watchable if needless redo of Bryan Bertino’s spare, effective modern classic, the second was a feature-length chase with enough to recommend as just that. The finale, however, offers no such payoff in demystifying the titular strangers who used to be faceless. There’s also little reward for Madelaine Petsch getting put through the wringer and for us completists who have been hanging on for the past two years. Why are we here and was this all worth it? No, because the filmmakers didn’t bring it home.
The film begins, three years prior, with a motel check-in where a young woman (Hannah Galway) obviously won’t be checking out. It’s the first and, frankly, last moment of genuine tension, although it does sincerely make one question how a dingy motel room (yet with a bath robe thrown in) can really cost $119 a night, not including a deposit.
Back to where The Strangers: Chapter 2 left off, it’s been a long couple of days for Maya (Petsch) in the minuscule town of Venus, Oregon. After she manages to kill Pin-Up/Shelly (Ema Horvath), the now-deceased stranger’s fellow strangers, Scarecrow and Dollface, form a new plan. Perhaps Maya can replace Pin-Up when she puts on the mask after a ride-along/kill-along and become complicit in their killing spree; as the saying goes, if you can’t stab them, join them. Meanwhile, Sheriff Rotter (always-sinister Richard Brake) is still suspicious as hell, but if and how he is involved with the surviving strangers can be left up to the viewer to discover. Chapter 3 also goes Psycho when Maya’s sister, Debbie (Rachel Shenton), comes looking for her, with her husband (George Young) and their driver/bodyguard (Miles Yekinni) in tow.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 flirts with taking big risks but then doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain by being paced at a sleepy crawl and, worse, feeling stretched too thin without psychological insight. There is a kernel of a fascinating idea that this particular chapter probes but frustratingly only dips its toes into before becoming yet another revenge story. To see a trauma victim possibly become a killer and join a group of serial killers, like an initiation that could turn into Stockholm syndrome, is a promising chance to take for any movie, let alone the third in a trilogy. That is the one intriguing direction that this particular chapter takes and then muddles it up with facile, inane, suspense-free backstories from Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland’s script. Like the handy definition of a “serial killer” is supposed to help us glean more understanding for their motivations.
Resourceful and resilient as our final girl, Petsch was giving it her all in the previous two films. She still is, but much less is asked of her this time around, despite how physically and psychologically tortured Maya has been. She gets to make one smart escape, only to be forced to take a foolish step back. Stare, observe (sometimes behind a mask), and then act catatonic as if losing all sense of feeling and empathy, Petsch isn’t give the chance to do much more than that, and watching a magnetic performer become monotonous is not where we want to be. Maya’s final moments with her attackers should be more haunting than they really are; in fact, there should be more satisfaction than what we’re handed before the end credits. Everyone else in the cast gets to act suspicious, until the jig is up; Richard Brake and Gabriel Basso have looks that definitely kill, but they can only convince us of so much.
Director Harlin does know how to choose an evocative needle drop (like Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” and The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin”), but any way you slice and dice it, this technically well-made entry is mostly a slog and a waste of time. Putsch has worked far harder than the script deserves, remaining the highlight and surviving this failed experiment that ends with a shrug. For all that Maya has gone through—her own personal hell—The Strangers: Chapter 3 just ends up the misguided final insult. And now that it’s all over, it can be confirmed that the existence of an entire trilogy was never justified. “Why are you doing this?” takes on a whole metal level.
Rating: 1.5/5
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is currently in theaters.
