The Strangers - Chapter 3 Review: Lifeless, Boring and Thoroughly Uninteresting Trilogy Comes to a Dull, Whimpering End

6 days ago 7

Published Feb 5, 2026, 6:00 PM EST

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to spend time explaining who the titular strangers are, they no longer become strangers, and now they’re a hell of a lot less scary. It’s almost impressive just how fundamentally wrong Renny Harlin’s trilogy has understood the appeal of the characters originally created by Bryan Bertino. Of course people left the original film wondering who these sadistic serial killers are and why they do what they do, but that doesn't mean you spend four and half hours over three films dispelling the entire mystery. The whole point of Bertino’s original was to prey upon the unseen and the unexplained. Here is the American suburban nightmare: You get attacked for no reason. Nowhere is safe to hide from the whims of the sociopathic. I can’t think of anything less interesting than understanding Scarecrow’s childhood.

The Strangers - Chapter 3 mercifully brings Harlin’s trilogy to a whimpering end. One of the most boring studio horrors of recent memory, its brisk 90 minutes somehow feel interminable. Between all the dead air and the slew of unnecessary flashbacks — none of which that give even a sliver of new information — there’s barely a film here at all. The entire thing is held together by the flimsiness of a plastic mask’s elastic band.

The Strangers - Chapter 3 is the Final Nail in the Coffin of a Wasted Trilogy

After a requisite flashback opening kill scene, Alan Freedland and Alan R. Cohen’s lifeless script hilariously gives us a title screen with the dictionary definition of a serial killer. Okay, thanks, I didn't realize anyone was unclear. Then, it scoots forward to seconds after the events of Chapter 2. Maya (Madelaine Petsch) hovers behind a tree, makeup somehow perfect, blood splatter tastefully curated on her face, watching as Scarecrow and Dollface hack down their dead friend, Pin-Up Girl. Talk about beating a dead horse.

Bloodied and broken-bodied, Maya hobbles her way through the Oregonian forest until she stumbles across a tiny, old church with (for some reason) a metric ton of pre-lit candles. Almost as soon as she arrives, the mysterious Gregory arrives (Gabriel Basso). The two have a sleepy conversation over an obvious product placement for Bulleit Rye (something about how they’re both grieving partners, but who cares). Maya gets spooked, and bolts away.

Soon she’s face to face with Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) who is still desperate to keep Maya from ruining the town’s carefully kept secrets, but not desperate enough to get rid of her. Maya attempts to steal his police vehicle, but is quickly rammed off the road by the surviving Strangers, and then dragged to their abandoned saw mill home.

Chapter 3 is so devoid of tension and basic energy that it seems like the entire cast has overdosed on sleeping pills.

The rest of the film is a pretty standard stalk-and-slash with the added wrinkle that Scarecrow is trying to force Maya into taking the place of the third Stranger. It is moderately interesting to see how this deeply traumatized girl gets seduced by bloodshed, but it is such a passing fancy that one wonders if the writers even meant to go there, so quickly do they dispel this notion.

Renny Harlin used to be a very dependable schlock director, and his competence with action formalism is not entirely lost here, but the guy who directed flicks like Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger and Deep Blue Sea seems to be lost. Chapter 3 is so devoid of tension and basic energy that it seems like the entire cast has overdosed on sleeping pills.

It certainly doesn’t help that the A-plot is supplemented by a cliched backstory. The finale of this tired franchise only finds a moment of intrigue in the dying gasp of its final seconds, if only because Harlin’s choices are so bonkers it’ll make you momentarily wake up to laugh incredulously.

Perhaps it’s the influence of the MCU on studio franchises everywhere, but of all films to over-explain character background, The Strangers must be the silliest of all. The only thing Harlin has done here is to remove the element of surprise. Without that, the film is nothing, nothing at all.