Despite Harlin's solid hold on pace and atmosphere, the narrative beats, jump scares and killers' catchphrases echo the original so slavishly that the film seems almost wholly pointless.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 11, 2025

Harlin’s approach to the material is dull and workmanlike.

| Sep 30, 2024

... But nothing that’s added makes this any better, or more frightening, a movie than its predecessors.

| Aug 13, 2024

Concentric twists and harrowing repetition of situations occur as if in a dream, despite its dirty realism... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2024

The Strangers: Chapter 1, doesn’t give viewers much hope for the future. Instead, the latest entry is an uninspired, ineffective retelling of the original, with a narrative that strives to give us answers to questions we never asked for.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 8, 2024

It is an astonishingly generic home invasion thriller that rehashes the 2008 original almost beat-for-beat, but with very little of that film’s genuine suspense and dread, and certainly not much to entice audiences back for more.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 5, 2024

The Strangers: Chapter 1 simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as a prologue, as its own story, as a redundant horror, or even as a piece of voyeuristic savagery.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 19, 2024

A home invasion that doesn't want to surprise, but doesn't want to provoke either... and whose result is predictably dull. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 17, 2024

Everything new is, by necessity, old for the same reason that the present is nothing more than the past. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 12, 2024

A film full of horror clichés and unable to shine on its own. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 11, 2024

There are rehashes, and then there’s The Strangers: Chapter 1, an uninspired thriller that doesn’t reinvent the franchise, it just shamelessly rips it off.

| Original Score: 3.5/10 | Jul 2, 2024

At this point, if I were reading a book, I’d throw it in the garbage bin before I’d even make it to Chapter 2. And that’s a promise.

| Original Score: F | Jul 2, 2024

As for the strangers, all they need to be is terrifying, a task at which they consistently excel. Just make sure to stay through the credits. That is, if you haven’t already rushed home to bolt the doors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 14, 2024

Not bold enough, it wasn't different enough, it wasn't exciting enough.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 11, 2024

There's nothing new here.

| Jun 11, 2024

The Strangers: Chapter 1 is a generic and boring slasher with a fundamental misunderstanding of its source material.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 11, 2024

Renny Harlin’s reimagining of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 psychological thriller is thin on scares and plot

| Jun 9, 2024

...exceedingly (and perhaps excessively) familiar territory that’s employed to periodically watchable yet progressively underwhelming effect...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 7, 2024

It smartly utilises all the tropes of a good horror but does so with an extra layer of intelligence that elevates it beyond its shlocky potential.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2024

Blunted by horror clichés and dumbness...

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 4, 2024