'The Stranger' is very tense and makes no sense
Hulu
As a psychological thriller escalates and a dangerous person returns, ideally you’ll be thinking something in the neighborhood of “Oh no!” as you clench teeth and avert eyes. “The Stranger,” unfortunately, is more likely to roll eyes as you mutter, “Oh, here we go again.”
Seemingly begging to be called “He Follows,” the film finds new L.A. rideshare driver Clare (“It Follows” star Maika Monroe) unable to shake Carl E. (Dane DeHaan), her passenger who claims to have killed a family at the house where Clare picked him up and progressively indicates that his tormenting of this former Kansan is a twisted study of human determination. This is as good a time as any to note that “The Stranger” originated as a 13-part series on Quibi, that short-lived app where everything existed in, sigh, quick bites. That it was possible to reasonably stitch the thing together into a larger meal is something, I guess, and perhaps in smaller doses viewers wouldn’t have time for disbelief to accumulate.
Or, actually, maybe as a series more characters connected and decisions and manipulations had room to breathe. At a surprisingly sluggish 95-ish minutes, “The Stranger” gets off to a crackling start and proceeds to get dumber and duller without any hint of recovery. There are so many times that you won’t buy who does what and how and why, with the explanations provided only likely to spark further irritation. Stories like this can have a great leanness to them, but “The Stranger” exits the car too early and finds itself really struggling to know where to go. Efforts to register as a warning about location-based technology do nothing that “The Bling Ring” or the first season of “You” didn’t.
Monroe, of course, has proven her ability to anchor something creepy, and it’s great to see DeHaan (“Chronicle,” “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”) in a role like this. But watching “The Stranger” just applies that old maxim to both the series-turned-movie and the platform where it originated: Just because you could doesn’t mean you should.
C
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