6.5

The Strangers: Chapter 2 Is Actually Pretty Good for an Hour

By Jesse Hassenger  |  September 26, 2025 | 9:43am
Movies Reviews Renny Harlin
The Strangers: Chapter 2 Is Actually Pretty Good for an Hour

The slasher sequel Halloween Kills features a cliché-busting moment that’s stuck with me for the last few years. Champion Final Girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has been hospitalized and treated for a severe abdominal stab wound when she hears that her nemesis Michael Meyers is still alive. Determined not to sit idly by, waiting for him to come kill her, she rips out her IV, jabs herself with painkillers, and triumphantly rises to her feet. She then spends the rest of the movie in agonizing pain and fails to set foot outside the building. She winds up back in her hospital bed, her determination no match for her body’s limitations, and the attendant trope no match for a dose of physical reality.

I thought of this moment again during The Strangers: Chapter 2, another second installment in a trilogy of a rebooted horror property, when Maya (Madelaine Petsch), also recovering from a very recently stitched-up stabbing, realizes that the silent masked stalkers of the first film have made their way to the hospital where she thought she was safe. She yanks out her IV – does anyone in a horror movie leave those damn things where they are, or at least have the nurse take them out? – and springs to her feet, performing a gauntlet of high-energy running, hiding, and otherwise evading her pursuers. It seems like a perfect example of the ridiculousness Halloween Kills was cleverly undermining … until the movie keeps Maya on her feet for so long, for such an extended, largely dialogue-free game of hide-and-stalk, that eventually the blood starts to flow again.

This extended sequence could, depending on how you count it, be said to take up as much as 40 or 50 minutes of The Strangers: Chapter 2, and serves as a Rosetta Stone for the whole bizarre project of a middle movie in a trilogy that jams out unbidden on a single, simple home invasion slasher movie from 2008. The previous movie remade that one, with Maya and her boyfriend staying at a rental house in a strange town, chosen at random for a bit of the ol’ stalk-and-kill. Now, the boyfriend is dead, Maya has barely survived, and the Strangers are still out there, determined to finish the job. Even in this level of danger, it is not realistic to have Maya nursing fresh stitches as she sprints barefoot through a hospital and down a rainy road, and later jumping out of a moving car. But after a while, the movie spends so long with Maya, only occasionally cutting away to tediously withholding goings-on in the mysterious town where she’s trapped, that it comes to terms with its absurdities. Maya’s limping and wincing increases; later, in this weekend’s second-truest instance of one battle after another, she’s attacked by … well, I don’t want to spoil perhaps the most genuinely surprising moment of any Strangers movie so far.

The second-most surprising moment, at least of this particular Strangers sequel, is that the movie finds its level, and that level is Halloween II. That largely hospital-set 1981 sequel to the original 1978 John Carpenter classic is also the subject of the aforementioned Halloween Kills riff. In both of those cases, the blatant lack of sequel story is mitigated (though not erased) by a kind of pure-horror marathon of nasty (and, in the case of Kills, genuinely evocative!) kills. Strangers 2 doesn’t have that gnarliness to serve as its ante-upping raison d’être. Instead, director Renny Harlin raises his stalking game, kicking off Maya’s ill-advised escape from her hospital bed with a single-take, emergency-lit scene where the camera tracks her around the suddenly empty hallways, the camera riding a wavy line between identifying with killer and victim.

Does it make sense that the hospital is suddenly mostly abandoned? Not really! But at its best, The Strangers: Chapter 2 achieves a kind of nightmare-logic simplicity, with minimal dialogue and woodsy survivalist atmosphere. Last time around, Petsch was suitably scrappy; here, she hardens her resolve even as her cartoonishly expressive face practically vibrates with justifiable paranoia, with Harlin repeatedly cutting in close on her liquid eyes. Even a few scenes of obligatory and hacky bad-guy backstory, although wholly divorced from the whole stated point of the original Strangers, has an eerie gothic concision, at least for a little while.

It can’t last – or rather, it is obligated to last for a whole other movie, release date TBD. (All three Strangers movies, shot back to back, were supposed to be out by now, but their release cadence has been strategically drawn out for reasons unknown, beyond the possible realization that three Strangers sequels is more than anyone actually needs.) In the movie’s final half-hour, repetition and torpor set in, a particular shame for a movie that can’t properly end, only leave off. It’s admittedly difficult to recommend an experience that amounts to a free-floating hour of a Riverdale gal really bleeding through it, with beginning and ending outsourced to other movies. Yet even that pointlessness works in favor of The Strangers: Chapter 2, however temporarily. For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

Director: Renny Harlin
Writers: Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath
Release Date: September 26, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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