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91It isn't particularly original--for one, it owes an unacknowledged debt to the French film "Them"--but as an exercise in controlled mayhem, horror movies don't get much scarier.
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90This is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertino's debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation.
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80A spare, creepily atmospheric psychological thriller with a death grip on the psychological aspect.
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Bertino's taut, spare thriller is plenty scary without relying on pseudo-historical context. Anchored by convincing performances from Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both of whom elevate their roles above the standard horror-movie caricature, this is an enormously unsettling movie.
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75There's nothing more to it than meets the eye, but Bertino understands the mechanics of suspense and knows how to use them.
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75This is one of those rare horror movies that concentrates on suspense and terror rather than on gore and a high body count.
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75Both Speedman and Tyler deliver solid, nuanced performances as a couple caught at the most fragile moment in their relationship.
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Bertino teases with the unknown until he's left no pimple ungoosed. Sometimes avoiding the synapse-raping bad habits of splat packers Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja is its own reward; doing so without also submitting to Michael Haneke–style hand-slapping is nearly monumental.
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70It's all efficiently nerve-jangling, with Tyler and Speedman credibly registering every hue of panic. Still, after such a long, creepy, cannily restrained buildup, it must be said the resolution is rather flat, a full-circle postscript rote.
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70There's nothing remotely new here, but the movie has the taut, queasy feel of an early 70s drive-in shocker: old-fashioned suspense without any guarantee of old-fashioned mercy.
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67Younger viewers who've cut their teeth on the instant horrors of modern "torture porn" may find The Stranger's pace and psychological upsets more slow-going than they might like. Yet a film like this may be just the bracing corrective the modern horror film needs.
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67Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.
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60Bertino does an excellent job building dread, especially during the first half of the movie. Every silence, pause and sudden noise startles - and the results, frankly, are more frightening than the graphic torture scenes in movies like "Hostel" and "Saw."
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60Ultimately, The Strangers does succeed in the sense that it offers a riveting, vastly credible enactment of everyone's worst nightmare.
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50You can only string an audience along for so long with scary masks and sudden appearances at the window, and after a while, the suspense starts seeping out of The Strangers, because you realize that's all there's going to be to the movie.
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50As pointless suspense exercises go, The Strangers at least gets off to a good start.
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38The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.
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30What possessed Liv Tyler to take a role in this sadistic, unmotivated home-invasion flick.
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25No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.
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25Here's the tricky thing about The Strangers. Sure, it uses cinema to ends that are objectionable and vile ... but it does it well, with more than usual skill.
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25Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."
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25Is Hollywood so disconnected from its past and bankrupt of ideas that it doesn't even know this movie is a screaming cliché?
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25Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.
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20I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.
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12The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.
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12A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.
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0All it offers is sadism, impure and simple.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 43 out of 82
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Mixed: 6 out of 82
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Negative: 33 out of 82
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