Welcome the Stranger is a 2018 thriller about a young woman who arrives unannounced at her estranged brother’s house, only to have paranoia and suspicion force the siblings to cling onto reality amidst mysterious circumstances.
Right from the start of Justin Kelly‘s latest creeper, there is an unsettling sense that nothing is as it seems, the eerie soulful overtones begging us to step outside our expectations. While hardly a horror film, there are moments of unease and questions of sanity that persist in this dark fairy tale of familial bonds that often makes for a genuinely engaging watch, even if it ends up hauling a bit more up the hill than it can carry.
Alice (Abbey Lee) drives along a country road, a hesitation in her eyes as she eventually comes upon a beautiful and spacious estate in the woods. Parking outside, she knocks on the door but to avail, soon slipping ’round to the back and the inground pool. Stripping bare, she plunges into the water and sits beneath a surface a moment before coming up and resting her head along the edge. From there, she sees a figure in the window, a young man who beckons her by name to join him inside. He is Ethan (Caleb Landry Jones), her brother, who is working against a deadline to finish a mysterious book, though there is something more strange about these siblings, sharing visions and paranoia that envelop them, compounded by the arrival of Ethan’s girlfriend Misty (Riley Keough).
Obviously, we are meant to question everything we are seeing, and if there is any success to Kelley’s direction and screenplay, it is the ambiguity. The siblings are estranged, their parents gone, and yet there is a kind of connection between them that defies explanation, even if it is far this side of odd. Alice initially doesn’t know why or how Ethan got the house, though when it’s learned, only causes further conflict. Ethan is cryptic, working on curious illustrations for the book and is obsessed with an image hanging on the wall. They discover a strange hole in the ground on the property that seems to tip Ethan from stability, his behavior increasingly erratic and even a little harmful, while Alice explores the vast property, uncovering even more to its sordid past.
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Kelly works hard to create unease, the claustrophobic setting and weird exchanges of dialogue making this a series of troubling questions, though there are few answers to be found. There comes a point well before the half when it becomes a bit of a chore rather than a challenge as long moments of just plain weirdness overcome the story itself. The two go on an extended and hysterical search for a pen, Alice wears a red dress and dances about a room, eventually masturbating on a bed (though not to the climax she hopes for), and there are the visions of a nude woman walking about the house that Alice swears is none other than Misty when she finally shows up, convinced the girlfriend has some sort malicious agenda. That might have something to do with the beams of bright gold light dropping out of the sky.
Psychological nightmares are a tricky beat to peddle and Kelly packs plenty inside this one, having us wonder what is real and what is not, who is sane and who is, well, less so. However, it’s so aggressively twisted and disconnected, it becomes nearly impossible to decipher. Kelly is pandering to a specific audience here, those who crave films that are entirely symbolic, wrought with dead-ends and quirky imagery. Welcome the Stranger is perversely inexplicable as such, so jarringly esoteric, it almost works. However, it ultimately lacks the gut punch the genre demands, its ending a little too obvious and easy to see coming. Nonetheless, as a trippy odyssey into the absurd, this more than qualifies.