The Strangers: Chapter 3 Trades Terror for Boredom

The Strangers: Chapter 3

★

The Strangers: Chapter 3 caps off what might go down as one of the worst movie trilogies of all time. Chapter 1 was so mind-numbingly dumb it doesn’t even cross into ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ territory. Chapter 2 was the most entertaining of the three, still not good, but passable horror. Now in Chapter 3 we’re given the worst, and by far most boring, of the series.

After an opening scene that gives us further backstory on the three masked killers, known as Scarecrow, Pin-Up Girl and Dollface, we pick up with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) right after the events of Chapter 2, where Maya escapes from Scarecrow and Dollface after killing Pin-Up Girl in self-defense. Injured and exhausted, she flags down Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) and gets in his squad car. Maya asks him for a first aid kit, then steals his car when he gets out to retrieve one from the trunk.

Richard Brake as Sheriff Rotter
© 2026 Lionsgate

Maya crashes the car ten seconds later and is captured by Scarecrow. We’re next treated to a flashback where we find out the Sheriff is Scarecrow’s dad. He’s been covering up his son’s murders in town, along with Pin-Up Girl and Dollface, since they were pre-teens. It kind of makes sense. It’s a town full of creepy people who whisper about you and offer sideways glances when you walk into the diner. It’s a place where you eat your food, pay your check, get the hell out of town and hope you’re not in some version of Deliverance.

Scarecrow seems to want Maya to replace Shelly (Ema Horvath), the now dead Pin-Up Girl, and join the trio of killers. I got the sense from the first film that this was the direction the series was going, but predictability is the least of the trilogy’s problems.

Madelaine Petch as Maya and Gabriel Basso as Gregory
© 2026 Lionsgate

Chapter 3 wants to be a psychological thriller, and it would have to be very well written to pull off turning the protagonist into a serial killer. It makes a weak case for Maya to have Stockholm syndrome, a coping mechanism where an abduction victim identifies with their captor, often adopting their beliefs and forming an emotional bond, to survive and avoid abuse. At least I think that’s what they were trying to connect. The story makes so little sense, I’m not really sure.

Madelaine Petch as Maya
© 2026 Lionsgate

Maya spends most of the film in a traumatized, catatonic state, occasionally reacting to the violence around her but doing very little about it. I’m pretty sure we’re meant to believe that Maya might join the masked killers. If she does, it’s supposed to be profound. If she doesn’t, it’s supposed to be because she survived a couple of hellish days in the backwoods of an Oregon small town. At this point in the series, I didn’t really care. My popcorn and Dr. Pepper were finished, and I just wanted the credits to roll.

Horror films can be dumb and stupid while still being entertaining. Sharknado comes to mind, a conceptually bad film where a freak hurricane hits Los Angeles and sends thousands of sharks ashore to terrorize the city. But it knew it was dumb and leaned into it. That’s why it has a cult following.

Madelaine Petch as Maya
© 2026 Lionsgate

Here, the filmmakers are hell-bent on convincing us they’re making great horror. It’s obvious that they’re trying very hard to do so. But a good scary movie doesn’t need to do any of that. It just terrorizes us for a couple of hours, flicks the theater lights on as the credits roll and reminds us to sleep with a nightlight on when we get home. The only thing that would have been more horrifying is if it were already available on streaming when I got home. Thankfully, that’ll be for at least a couple of weeks.