The Strangers is a 2008 psychological horror written and directed by Bryan Bertino in his feature debut, starring Liv Tyler as Kristen McKay and Scott Speedman as James Hoyt, with Glenn Howerton as James's friend Mike. It runs 86 minutes, was made for nine million dollars and took over eighty-two million worldwide. It holds a fifty percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels about right, because this is a film with a handful of genuinely superb ideas surrounded by a lot of decisions I found difficult to accept.

Let me start with my most petty objection, which I nonetheless stand behind completely. Curtains and a creepy house is a terrible combination, and more to the point, why does this front door not have a peephole? One small hole at eye level. That is the entire request. Every front door I have ever lived behind has had one. This house, isolated, remote, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with someone knocking at four in the morning, does not. It is a small thing and it bothered me the entire time.

Credit where it is due, though. This film is creepy, and it is creepy in a way that a great many horror films never manage. Bertino is patient, the framing is excellent, and there are long passages here where I simply sat very still.

What nagged at me was the relationship. For a considerable stretch, it genuinely felt as though James was gaslighting Kristen, treating her account of strange things happening in the house as something she was imagining. And then, once he finally accepts that she is telling the truth, his significant contribution is to instruct her to calm down. There are masked strangers circling the property. Calming down is not the appropriate response.

In fairness to the film, I discovered afterwards that there is a deliberate reason for the tension between them. Earlier that evening, at a friend's wedding reception, James proposed to Kristen and she declined. That is why they arrive home barely able to look at one another, and why the opening act is so uncomfortable. Bertino never tells you what actually went wrong, deliberately, in the same way he never explains anything else in this film. Knowing that, the awkwardness reads as intentional rather than sloppy, even if James's behaviour remains difficult to defend.

Then there are the strangers themselves, who appear to be ninjas. Or possibly ghosts. At one point one of them touches a character's shoulder, he turns around immediately, and there is nobody there. Instantly. I have logistical questions that the film has no intention of answering. To be clear, this is the design rather than an oversight. Bertino's most celebrated technique here is simply placing a masked figure in the background of a frame and letting the audience notice, and he never shows their faces unmasked on camera. The effect is that they stop feeling like people and start feeling like a weather event.