the strangers

what reall happened

On the night of February 11, 2005, Kristen McKay and James Hoyt left a friend wedding  reception and return to the Hoyt family summer home .

The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known.

On a darkened road at a stop light, Kristen McKay and James Hoyt sit in silence. He stares ahead. She does, too. A tear wets her cheek.

Something has gone awry for the festively attired pair in “The Strangers,” starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple terrorized by three masked assailants.

Decorated with rose petals and candles, the Hoyt family vacation home provides a clue. But soon we’ll learn that, even more than a rebuffed proposal, a home invasion can really douse a mood (though, arguably, make a couple stronger?).
Last year around this time, Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale also traveled a dark, empty road in a movie called “Vacancy,” only their characters were bickering. The moral of that film might have been that horror-movie hell makes the torture of relationships seem like a paradise.

“The Stranger,” writer-director Bryan Bertino’s debut feature, has more ambitions than that B-slasher. Early scenes build tenderness for Tyler and Speedman’s characters, only to squander our compassion with sorry plotting.“The Strangers” starts with dramatic sobriety. James and Kristen are a young couple at a crossroad. He wants to get hitched, offers a big ring to prove it. She has doubts and applies the brakes. Now they’re wandering around his family’s vacation home miserable and a little lost about what’s next. James calls a friend, tells him to pick him up the next morning.

The movie’s title could refer to the pair. When a couple’s dreams diverge, they can become strangers to each other.

But a knock at the door at 4 a.m. shifts the mood from “scenes from notquite-a-marriage” to something depressingly familiar: an increasingly sadistic hunt-and-pray flick.

A slim blond shows up at the door, her face in the shadows. “Is Tamara here?” she asks. She drifts away, saying “thanks” and “see you later.”

The three who terrorize the couple are identified in the credits as Dollface (Gemma Ward), Pin-Up Girl (Laura Margolis) and the Man (Kip Weeks). The women’s faces are hidden behind eerie plastic masks. The Man’s labored breathing comes out a wheeze through his cloth get-up. Throughout much of the film, they’re mute.

The horror genre thrives on the second-guessing of protagonists. But audience superiority comes quickly here. Empathy nurtured early gives way to seriously unkind judgments.

When James leaves Kristen alone after that unsettling visit, it’s the first of many acts that make it easy to part ways with the pair’s vulnerability

Of course, when it comes to movie inspiration, some events are truer than others. And if Internet chatter is accurate, this flick’s “inspiration” is a mash-up of slayings that barely resemble the set-up here.

Earlier this year, Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” covered the same turf: a family tormented by strangers. It was potently unpleasant (the filmmaker’s intention). And it did its psychic damage without ever resorting to a true-crime cheat.