STRANGERS: CHAPTER TWO

This film is the middle instalment of a trilogy, with ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ released in 2024 and ‘The Strangers: Chapter 3‘ due out in 2026. All three movies were filmed back-to-back and form a continuous story, so they don’t stand alone. Well done me then on watching Chapter 2 without seeing Chapter 1. I had to piece together the backstory from limited flashback clues, but the plot for both movies seems be pretty much the same apart from their locations. The entire franchise revolves around three masked serial killers targeting random strangers. They don’t have a motive – they are just psychopaths. In Chapter 2, the lead character Maya wakes up in a small town hospital bed with stab wounds, then spends 90 minutes making questionable decisions and relentlessly fighting for her life, as she’s hunted down by the strangers. It gets tedious and doesn’t have a resolution. The pacing is fast, with frequent jump scares and a few queasy bits, though a couple of animal cruelty scenes put me off. I’ve seen my fill of Maya battling these nut jobs, so unless that feeling wears off by early next year, Im not sure l’ll watch Chapter 3. A clever marketing ploy would’ve been to release all three films together as a triple header and do long, late night screenings. Maybe then Chapter 2 would’ve felt like a valid time investment.