Review: Netflix's THE STRANGER Plays With Some Good Ideas But Ultimately Disappoints
Coming from the book of the same name, The Stranger is an interesting show with a lot of pretty good ideas, some successful execution, but ultimately an unsatisfactory watch when it concludes and comes together.
The Stranger’s story of a mysterious woman coming to town and revealing secrets for extortion or just for no reason at all is an interesting premise, but hard to justify. The show handles the mysteries nominally well at first, about three or four sets of secrets and stories all by the end of the first episode. However, the storylines are separated and we know they must eventually come together. This weird distance between plots just seems very silly and ultra contrived by the time people started to stumble into each other’s storylines. It would be like having a plumber, an opera singer, and a farmer all appear in an episode, doing their own things, knowing that the show would eventually force all the characters together for the sake of an “interesting” mystery. It just felt unnatural and way beyond the normal suspension of disbelief for movies or TV shows.
The ending is also a bit underwhelming because it feels like there were three or four endings/reveals that kept trying to “one up” the previous one. I felt as though the show wanted to subvert expectations just to be unique or original but instead just took the weight and power out from the reveals by fooling the audience with another reveal a few minutes later.
With all this said, there were a lot of pretty good moments and ideas, but they mostly came from particular performances or plot points. The acting overall was okay, with a couple of familiar faces such as Richard Armitage (The Hobbit) and Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man). The writing was all right, but not overwhelmingly good. The biggest problem with the writing is that many times characters blow by intense feelings or situations with jokes or not have them at all. This makes the story as a whole lose weight and importance here and there.
Lastly, I am normally not concerned if music is generic or even boring in TV shows. The Stranger didn’t have any impactful music except the opening song. It’s terrible, like really generic, the lyrics are horrible and very on-the-nose for the show, ominous scary sounds and music would have been much better than this radio pop-rock-punk-dramatic trash fire.
The show as a whole does a small handful of things pretty well, a few story elements and performances lend themselves to possibly being really engaging. But I found myself not caring most of the time and just being neither disturbed, amazed, thrilled, nor surprised by the show as a whole, especially the reveals at the end. If I never watched it again or in the first place, I would be totally fine.
