The Strangers: Chapter 3 review – pointless remake trilogy ends with a sputter

Renny Harlin’s thankless trio of movies, taking a simple story and extending it for no creative reason, is at least finally over 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 Ca...

‘Everything became a lie, a performance’ – Werner Herzog on Soviet Russia

The German director is championing Georgian film-maker Rezo Gigineishvili’s movie about the dying days of the USSR. But, he says, he won’t be drawn into contemporary political debates

What was Stalin like when he was ill? Did he have stomach pains? Did it make him sad? In Rezo Gigineishvili’s film Patient #1, a frail communist leader in the 1980s Soviet Union seeks urgent answers to these questions as he feels his life slipping from him. But the comrade he calls from his hospital bed provides no reassurance: Stalin was never ill, he was only ever strong.

Spurred on to live up to the dictator they called the Man of Steel, the general secretary brushes off his doctors’ concerns and orders to be driven to the Kremlin. But he dozes off before his limousine starts rolling, and the motorcade merely circles the hospital grounds: a melancholy image of a Russian empire locked in ever-repeating cycles of history.

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