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If you’re wondering how this shrug-along horror series has got this far, Renny Harlin shot all three back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022; reshoots followed the indifferent response to the first chapter in 2024, which didn’t much alleviate the even more indifferent response to last year’s second. We’re getting them whether we wanted them or not: the modest resources had been spent, and so we now arrive at the last knockings which comprise this year’s most dutiful carnage. The mistake is to expand a morally gloomy universe that was better off self-contained; the more light Harlin and collaborators let in, the more their set-up presents as generic runaround, hopelessly out of place amid the recent horror renaissance.
We’re deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Campbell moment) continues to scurry about a devout woodland community like a bloodied fieldmouse with resting iPhone face; the masked thrill-killers – previously three, now two – have now gained ulterior motives for pursuing her. Also present: tatted survivor Gregory (Gabriel Basso, who must have been hoping for more to do) and ever-shifty Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), whose link to the killers is finally made explicit. New blood arrives in the form of Maya’s sister Debbie (Hollyoaks alumna and recent short-film Oscar-winner Rachel Shenton) who comes to town seeking answers, only to be drawn into another round of humdrum stalk-and-slash.
Somewhere in the background is the unnerving (and not untimely) idea of an all-American community that tolerates killers in its midst as long as they prey on outsiders. Yet Harlin ties up his loose ends in characteristically leaden and workmanlike fashion, with scene pacing that would have seemed antiquated circa Wes Craven’s Scream; a full 30 minutes of pregnant pauses hardly shake the suspicion there wasn’t enough plot in play for a trilogy. The 2008 original will probably endure as a solid, sleepover-ready example of American ordeal cinema, but this final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.
