THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2 - Mark Reviews Movies

The Strangers: Chapter 2, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2025

We know The Strangers: Chapter 2 hasn't learned a single thing as soon as Maya (Madelaine Petsch), who survived being terrorized and stabbed by a trio of killers in the last movie, loudly and repeatedly bangs on a door while being stalked by those same killers. After waking up in the hospital following her ordeal, Maya seems to be doing so well once she suspects that those masked murderers have arrived to finish the job. She lightly steps through the halls, certain that at least one of those three is nearby, and carefully checks her surroundings for any sign that someone might attack. Once she reaches those doors, though, it's as if her survival instincts suddenly vacate her brain and body.

Maya and her now-dead fiancé were the particularly dunderheaded protagonists of The Strangers: Chapter 1, which is saying something in a subgenre that's notorious for needing characters to do dumb things over and over again so that some slasher can kill them. With the boyfriend gone, Maya seems to have to pick up the slack left by his absence, so she's as loud as can be throughout this movie.

There's a moment when she returns to the scene of the crime from the preceding entry, and sure, Maya must be hungry after escaping the hospital, wandering the woods, and putting up with a—depending on whether or not the screenplay needs her to be in peril at the moment—sporadically painful stab wound. Does she really have to pick the crunchiest snack imaginable for munching? The three killers do, after all, have a habit of being right behind Maya, since it's not as if she or anyone else thinks to cover her trail in any way, either.

This prequel/reboot/who-cares-anymore-at-this-point series is really starting to feel like a joke, and in theory, we're only two-thirds of the way through it by the end of this installment. The previous movie was a weird prospect, serving as an unofficial remake of the 2008 original that surely couldn't work for those who had seen that movie, since it basically just repeated the plot, and, by giving away the killers' twisted game at the very top, ruined any sense of surprise for potential newcomers.

The sequel, which will be followed by a third and supposedly final chapter at some point in the future (This one took more than a year to be released, intentionally or accidentally ensuring that everyone would forget its predecessor), doesn't even have much of a game for anyone to play. Maya is constantly on the run from the three masked killers, who are good enough sports to let her flee from the hospital even though she's barefoot, bleeding, and barely able to run. Returning screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedlan clearly are aware that they have to drag out this very simple story over the course of at least three movies, and we can see the unconvincing effort at almost every turn of the plot.

Here, we get Maya basically guaranteeing that the killers will know exactly where she has been, is, and will be with every move. The murderers, meanwhile, never seem to decide if they're in a rush to clean up their mistake from the previous night or take their time, since it's quickly apparent that their prey is going to make it very easy for them to find her.

After the hospital sequence where she somehow finds even more doors to bang and jangle, the biggest threat Maya faces in this movie, by the way, is a wild boar who finds her in the woods. When the centerpiece sequence of a slasher movie revolves around a random animal that just happens to show up, that's a very good sign that the filmmakers have lost the plot, as well as the point, of what they're doing. A string of flashbacks explaining the origin of one or more of the masked killers goes against the mysterious spirit of these foes, but they also diminish any momentum the extended chase might have garnered.

Director Renny Harlin returns, since he apparently shot all three installments back-to-back-to-back, and offers no sense of where Maya is in relation to the killers or vice versa. That eliminates any sense of tension, as do a moment when our protagonist appears to teleport across a room after ducking down and the sheer number of lengthy close-ups of Maya's terrified eyes instead of, you know, establishing why she is—and we should be—frightened in the first place. The Strangers: Chapter 2 stretches an already-thin concept thinner and thinner in just about every moment.

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