Getting Renny Harlin to helm the three-part Strangers reboot was a pretty impressive feat – proof that the producers want this trilogy to succeed. They’ve also critic-proofed it by ensuring that all three instalments were filmed at once, (thankfully) ensuring that the almost unanimously poor reviews won’t prevent the second and third parts from getting off the ground. Most of those responses have observed that this is largely a retread or reboot of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 classic, and that’s undoubtedly true. Yet the premise of the original Strangers is so resonant, and Harlin’s directorial touch is so assured, that it’s hard not to be drawn into the suspense anew, even if this can’t ever quite reach the heights of the 2008 film. There are also enough differences this time around to make Chapter 1 work on its own terms, especially as it gestures towards an ongoing narrative that was absolutely unthinkable after the unforgiving endings of The Strangers and the 2018 sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night.

Once more, the film begins by reminding us that what we’re about to see is based on a true story, adding to the sense of facticity by also informing us that there’s one violent crime every seven seconds in America, meaning that several have already been committed by the time that brief opening credits roll. Once more, too, we’re presented with a young couple trying to survive the night in a remote house against three masked “strangers” who are bent on torturing, terrifying and eventually annihilating them. This time, though, the couple aren’t in their own house – they’re a pair of millennials en route to Portland, Oregon, where they’re planning to cement their life as a couple, Ryan (Froy Guttierez) with a career in finance and Maya (Madelaine Petsch) with a career in architecture. When their car suspiciously breaks down in the hamlet of Venus, Oregon, they’re forced to spend the night in a remote Airbnb belonging to a hunter and woodsman. That places Chapter 1 alongside Airbnb horror such as The Rental and Barbarian, with the difference that Airbnb has now become somewhat of a thing of the past, relegated to the same creaky, ancient, Gothic trappings as the cabin itself.

No sooner have the couple arrived than the first of the strangers makes their appearance, and it’s here that the film leans into the brilliance of the original. For all their masked anonymity, classic slashers like Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers all had a backstory that provided them with a motive, no matter how distant or abstract it might have become towards the end of their respective franchises. By contrast, the strangers’ only explanation for targeting their victims is “because you were home,” meaning that they are less traditional slashers than forces of radical estrangement, embodiments of the disavowed otherness that is needed for normal middle-class life to function. The horror of the strangers is that they are always already inside the house, as a core component of its fantasy of itself, and so feel more at home than the putative occupants. Here, as in the original, the strangers move deliberately, slowly, calmly, and mercurially, with all the confidence of people in their own abode, whether they’re sitting placidly in an armchair watching an oblivious Maya as she plays on the rustic piano in the living room, or when one of the strangers actually sits down and continues her rendition of Moonlight Sonata once she’s out of earshot. When Ryan accidentally mistakes the owner of the house for one of the strangers, and shoots him on sight, it only enhances this sense that these “invaders” belong inside more than anyone else.

In Bertino’s film, the strangers’ radical estrangement was also associated with a new digital porosity. Just as the victims were attempting to defend themselves against a home invasion that had already happened, they were also attempting to shore up the material thresholds of their home against a digital collapse of physical space that had already happened. As with Bertino, Harlin conveys that digital devolution of material reality by heightened the auditory plane of the film to evoke a new world that cannot be represented through images alone. In fact, Harlin draws on almost exactly the same sonic palette of the original – the creaky keys of a piano, the hiss and splutter of an old vinyl machine, and the crackly intonations of Joanna Newsom, all of which suggest an analog universe that is breaking down at the precise moment that Ryan and Maya need to erect sturdy physical barriers between themselves and the strangers. Adam Wingard makes a similar link between staticky vinyl and confounded thresholds in 2011’s You’re Next, which starts with a record player skipping, and then moves to an involuted home invasion narrative in which the putative invaders become the victims. In Chapter One, that glitch aesthetic continues even when Maya and Ryan escapes the house, most memorably when Maya takes shelter beneath a huge pile of dry leaves, only to realise that she has to lift her hand up, and loudly disrupt this staticky medium, to get a decent signal.

Nevertheless, these glitches of real and virtual space tend to be most pronounced around the points and ceremonies of ingress to the house. In a repeat of one of the most iconic scenes from the original film, the first stranger that Ryan and Maya meet is a young girl who knocks several times on the door and asks the same question in every instance: “Is Tamara home?” From here, the strangers glitch all distinction between inside and outside, generating horror by denaturing the gazes that typically mark the threshold to the bourgeois home. Early on, the camera pulls back to show Maya listening at the door as the body of one of the strangers flits across the extreme foreground. Likewise, when Maya first comes across a stranger inside, it’s in one of the most innermost recesses of the house, in the midst of a blackout that renders the encounter even more intimate. As a last resort, Maya and Ryan barricade themselves in the bedroom, the last vestige of privacy in the house and the most sacrosanct of its bourgeois spaces. Yet no sooner do they resort to this symbolic sequestration than they realise the strangers have been there before them, and written “Hello” over and over again in blood on the back of the very door they have erected against them. When the lead stranger breaks a hole in this door, he doesn’t kill Maya and Ryan then and there, but instead just gazes at them blankly through the aperture, claiming this last and most public-private threshold as his own.

No surprise, then, that when the violence comes it also clusters around these thresholds. The first time one of the strangers actually inflicts bodily harm occurs at the window of an outhouse. Just as Maya glimpses a stranger in the outhouse, another stranger pulls her head through the window, subjecting her body to the staticky violence that has accumulated around these liminal zones. Even when the action spills out into the surrounding forests, Harlin evokes the boundaries of the original house by squeezing the strangers to the edge of the frame, where they typically manifest themselves as a fleeting trace on the fringes of the image. During the third act, the strangers are largely relegated to figments in the corners of their victims’ eyes, the disavowed remainder required to prop up their fantasies of home and hearth, which makes it all the more shocking when the film concludes on the same harrowingly embodied note of the original, albeit with a twist that sets up the next two films.

Nevertheless, for all that it leans effectively into the brilliance of the original, and adds a few touches of its own, Chapter 1 does pale a little in comparison to Bertino’s vision. Part of the genius of the 2008 film was that the couple were already alienated before the invasion began, having just returned from the devastating scene of a failed marriage proposal. Something of that trauma percolates into the reboot, as Maya gently informs Ryan that he missed a perfect moment to propose to her, but he redresses it pretty quickly by promising to ask for her hand in marriage at a more opportune time. Likewise, while Harlin’s evocation of the woods is great, it’s hard not to miss the exquisitely etched exurbia of the 2008 film, with its disorienting palette of cul-de-sacs, sodium lighting and looming parklands. Still, those are small gripes for a film that basically sets out to reboot a masterpiece, and – surprisingly – largely pulls it off.