Crew
Directors/Story – Clarke & Gerrard [Mike Clarke & Paul Gerrard], Screenplay – Mike Clarke, Producers – Mike Clarke & Paul Gerrard, Photography – Neil Oseman, Music – The High Priest, Visual Effects – Refuge VFX, Makeup Effects – Mark Danbury, John David Dawson, Jessica Hall, Patrycia Nowacka & Poppy Savage, Production Design – Paul Gerrard. Production Company – Half Sun Entertainment Ltd/Studio Gerrard.
Cast
Isabella Percival (Karli), Jennifer K. Preston (Amanda), Damien Ashley (Kyle), Jake Francis (Greg), Lindy Pieri (Old Woman)
Plot
Amanda’s husband Greg is murdered by intruders in their home. In the aftermath, Amanda sells the house and buys a B&B in the remote countryside. She and her seventeen-year-old daughter Karli move there to set up. Karli is not happy with being expected to take a year off and help her mother instead of going on to university. While her mother is out, Karli answers the door to Kyle, who says his car has broken down and begs to stay the night, even though she says they are not open for business yet. He offers her £160 for one night and tells her to keep the rest. However, in the morning, when Amanda meets him, Kyle says he has no car and that he paid for three nights. As night comes, Kyle takes them hostage as sinister figures who have been hunting him surround the property, determined to claim him.
Full disclosure – I started watching The Stranger thinking that I was watching a completely different film, namely the Australian crime drama with the same title released the same year, The Stranger (2022) starring Joel Edgerton. Instead, I find a low-budget British horror film made by directors/producers Mike Clarke and Paul Gerrard.
The trope of the mysterious and/or deceitful, possibly even malevolent stranger who enters a home has a reasonable history on screens and in genre material in particular. See the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), The Shout (1978), Brimstone and Treacle (1982), Man Facing Southeast (1986), That Eye, The Sky (1994), Visitor Q (2001), The End of the Animal (2010), The Final Storm (2010), Outside Satan (2011), Borgman (2013) and Let Us Prey (2014). (See Mysterious Strangers).
The Stranger starts out fairly ordinarily. There is nothing exceptional about Clarke & Gerrard’s direction as we follow Jennifer K. Preston’s relocation to a remote rural B&B and daughter Isabella Percival’s unhappiness at being forced to go too. Even the initial scenes with Damien Ashley as The Stranger seem unexceptional until about the 45-minute point where he pulls a gun on them and starts talking about people coming after him. At that point, what starts out seeming like a Sinister Stranger film then becomes something else altogether.
From this point, The Stranger starts to step over into an increasingly more uncanny and possibly supernatural/occult film as the mysterious figures in black surround the house and even break in, talking in unearthly voices. There are even phone calls from them masquerading as Jennifer K. Preston’s late husband imploring them to come out. By this point the film comes out starting to resemble something akin to Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995).
The frustration of The Stranger is that while its second half is by far the more interesting, it explains nothing about what is going on. There are no answers as to who the mysterious figures surrounding the guesthouse are, or even why Damien Ashley is on the run from them and they keep pursing. It creates an intrigue but also makes for a frustratingly abrupt film when it reaches it 79-minute end.
Trailer here