The Reel Review
A rideshare driver’s life becomes a nightmare after she picks up a mysterious passenger who strangely seems to know a lot of information about her and starts stalking her. Maika Monroe and Dane DeHaan star in this psychological horror/thriller.
The Stranger initially was a 13-episode miniseries on the short-lived Quibi app in 2020 that writer/director Veema Sud (The Killing, The Lie) re-edited into a straight-to-video feature film for Hulu. That said, the plot plays out like a nonsensical word salad, as Monroe (Watcher, It Follows), as Claire, becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator, finding herself in increasingly bizarre situations. DeHaan (Oppenheimer, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) ends up having a comparatively small role.
There really is nothing redeemable about this tedious, poor excuse for a film. The acting is awful, the story completely senseless and the pacing is tedious.
REEL FACTS
• Veema Sud currently is adapting Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a TV series for Amazon Prime.
• Maika Monroe’s most recent film was Longlegs. Her next film will be the crime drama In Cold Light, with They Follow, the sequel to the 2015 horror It Follows, slated to begin filming in 2025.
• Pennsylvania native Dane DeHaan lives in New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
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