The Stranger

When it comes down to genre films independent horrors often get a great amount of backlash. Fortunately, as Eli Roth points out in an interview for Indiewire, the attitude towards independent horror features may be slowly changing. The reason for this could be an increasing awareness of the low-budget production contexts that surround these films.

The Stranger, written and directed by Guillermo Amoedo and produced by Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel, The Green Inferno to mention a few), is an odd film which mixes horror, psychological thriller and supernatural elements.

The film opens with Martin, the stranger of the title, looking for his wife Ana in a small deserted Canadian town. The film’s premise is that he wants to kill Ana to stop a disease they both suffer from: addiction to the human blood. He discovers, however, that she is already dead. He thus wants to commit suicide so that the disease will not further spread. But when something unexpected happens his visit to the town will take a very different turn.

The film’s first half hour manages to build an extremely gripping setting and story. The cast is limited to a close number of main characters and to a few extras which increases the town’s feeling of emptiness and mystery. In fact, the landscape photography is probably one of the best technical features of the film, what Eli Roth described as the director’s ability to get “that dark quiet mood, and the loneliness and the isolation of this town.”

However, the film’s remaining running time becomes quite redundant, void of characterization and original plot twists thus leaving a feeling of flatness in the spectator. It is unfortunate that even the main character is not a well-rounded one, since there was a great potential for character development.

What the film succeeds in is certainly its peculiar look, which makes this horror escalate on a slow-pace through a grim and intimate visual style.