The Stranger opens with a premise you’ve already seen and know. Amanda mourns her murdered husband when she moves with her daughter Karli to a remote B&B in the British countryside. Kyle arrives looking for a room. It turns out to be much more difficult to get rid of than expected. For much of it, it feels like a home invasion thriller that has chosen its path and intends to stay there.
This familiarity turns out to be a trap. Mike Clarke and Paul Gerrard spend the first act letting Kyle become the problem before suggesting that he might not be the worst thing in the area. After making the festival and VOD rounds in 2022, The Stranger is getting a new digital release in the UK via Trinity Content Partners.
The film refuses to say what it is
Halfway through, Kyle stops reading as a simple threat and the film drifts into a stranger place. Figures in black gather around the property. Voices and phone calls come in without any clear boundaries between manipulation and something that shouldn’t be able to call you. The film that was about a man who doesn’t want to leave becomes a film about what followed him there, and that refusal to stay put is the best part. A little British home invasion picture has all the room in the world to be competent and forgettable. This one appeals to occult horror and creature instincts without abandoning the family drama it started with, and the heartbreak between Amanda and Karli is still present beneath it all.
Damien Ashley is what’s holding up. Kyle has to work through two possibilities at once, believable as a threat inside the house and believable as a man genuinely terrified of something bigger than himself, and Ashley keeps both readings live without indicating which one he’s playing. He is unsettling in scenes where he does nothing in particular. Jennifer K. Preston counts for the opposite reason, as Amanda can’t match Kyle’s frequency without the film devolving into noise, and Isabella Percival’s Karli adds another pressure point to an already strained mother-daughter relationship before anyone comes knocking at the door. The winter countryside is stark and empty and gives the film production a value that its limited resources could never have produced on a soundstage. All of this has periods where the pace sags and the atmosphere is asked to do the work the plot should do.
The mystery is beyond the answers
The numbers in black are effective precisely because the film does not explain them right away. Not knowing what it’s about is the most sustained feeling the film produces, and I’m not about to claim that horror is accountable to anyone. The answers are not automatically scarier than the questions. Many good ideas have been explained directly into the ground. But there’s a difference between holding back and stopping, and Kyle’s pursuers become the most interesting element of the film almost exactly at the moment the story loses interest in them. What they want and how they connect to it is outlined and then abandoned.
Here’s the part that matters to me. The film’s limitations rarely appear in its appearance. They show how willing the story is to follow its best idea. The mythology continues to expand until the film reaches the point where it needs to give us a little more and slowly declines. This is not the same as intentionally leaving a monster in the dark. The Stranger gets close enough to something fascinating that the last few steps he doesn’t take become what you remember.
