THE STRANGERS

James and Kristen were supposed to spend a wonderful and romantic weekend in his childhood home, but something went wrong on their way back from a friend's wedding, and now the two are on the verge of breaking up. They decide to spend the night in that large house lost in the woods, decorated as a love nest by James, before returning the next day to their own lives. But during the night someone knocks insistently at the door: they are three masked strangers who manage to break into the house, terrifying and torturing the ex-lovers. The mini 'home invasion' genre boasts noble initiators who, if we exclude some examples of classic Western cinema and the immortal 'Night of the Living Dead', can be placed in the '70s, when Kubrick showed the rampages of the Droogs in 'A Clockwork Orange', Peckinpah described the bloody attempt at defense by Dustin Hoffman in 'Straw Dogs', and the numerous Italian rape & revenge films told us of brutal convicts who break into other people's homes and, after unspeakable violence, are punished. Perhaps it is to this tradition that the latest representative of this genre, 'The Strangers', refers, a minimalist and tension-filled film intent on telling us about a handful of terrifying hours spent at the mercy of a trio of strangers who have infiltrated a house. The suspicion that the style of the glorious '70s was the main source of inspiration for 'The Strangers' is increased by a suspicious initial caption accompanied by a narrating voice that informs us that the film is based on real events, going into the details of the story that inspired it. The mind immediately goes to Hooper's 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre', which began in the same way. 'The Strangers' is precisely this, a deep, unsettling, and apparently unconscious reformulation of the minimalist terror founded in the genre cinema of the '70s. There is no need for explicit citations, period costumes, or icons of that era to make an horror in pure '70s style today, or rather they are not essential; a compact story that does not throw itself into needless complexity, good management of tension, and an 'antagonist' that is tangible evil but also a metaphor of the same, even better if historically and socially locatable, are enough. 'The Strangers' succeeds excellently in all this and, although arriving after the exceptional 'Them' (with which it shares a lot) and the USA version of 'Funny Games', it does not pale within the recent discourse on 'home invasion', even contributing to increasing the charm of this genre, which is as sadistic as it is realistic. The strangers, or if we want foreigners, who infiltrate the home are the most obvious example of the human fear of the violation of one's private spaces, which can be those of the home, or, if we widen the range of action and metaphorize the invasion, those national. The faceless foreigners, therefore indistinguishable from the crowd, who penetrate our space to steal our intimacy and our life can be the reflection of the Western world's fear of him who comes from beyond national borders; whether he is Mexican, Iraqi, Romanian, it does not matter, he has no face, comes from outside but lives among us and can do us harm. This right-wing way of seeing 'The Strangers' is a simple hypothesis of reading, but it should not be excluded since horror is always attentive to reflecting contemporary fears and today, as it has always been, man is afraid of himself whom he does not know, who comes from afar and who can take away everything he has, up to his own life. An I as unconscious and metaphorical as material and materializable. Beyond a purely sociological vision, 'The Strangers' works anyway as a perfect tense toy, succeeding in 90 minutes to maintain a constant suspense and an adequately high sense of danger. Bryan Bertino, director and screenwriter here at his debut, thus manages to build an effective thesis of tension on celluloid, even if many of the most 'scary' moments rely on the use of sudden appearance or the alternation of sound planes. What is more convincing is instead the subtle and constant sense of unease and powerlessness that the viewer manages to perceive together with the protagonists of the story, sometimes caught in all their vulnerability by the almost ghostly appearances of the strangers who, out of focus, sneak into the frame and approach the victim's back undisturbed, having the viewer as the only witness of the imminent fright. What can be reproached to Bertino is the exaggeration of a single and unique narrative event sometimes carried a bit too long, without the introduction of any element capable of breaking even for a few minutes the tension, thus forcing the viewer on a long journey in apnea towards an ending that anyway does not reserve any kind of surprise. In the scene are present only five actors, three of whom are always masked (compliments to the unsettling look!); the remaining two are Scott Speedman ('Underworld' and 'Underworld: Evolution') and Liv Tyler ('The Lord of the Rings'; 'The Incredible Hulk'), the first does not leave a mark, the second hits the right chord with which to make her Kristen, once a screaming doll and not an improvised heroine, but a credible victim. A film that definitely deserves half a pumpkin more.