‘The Strangers’ Case’ Review: A Polished But Heavy-Handed Thriller Sorts the Villains From the Victims of the Syrian Refugee Crisis

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic The international scope and grueling human cost of the global refugee crisis lends itself to contemporary epic filmmaking of a particularly sober stripe, as seen mostly recently in Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” and Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated “Io Capitano.” Shorn of their ripped-from-the-headlines urgency, such stories of humans crossing vast distances and facing hostile odds in pursuit of a better life are as old as time itself.

A muscular, assured debut feature from U.S. producer-turned-director Brandt Andersen, “The Strangers’ Case” stresses the sprawling scale of the situation with a chaptered structure that pivots between multiple involved parties in the refugee’s journey, from warmongers to traffickers to rescuers to the displaced victims themselves.

That wide span, however, prevents a particularly penetrating look at any individual experience of the crisis. Brandt draws his characters in broad, flat strokes that serve the architecture of the narrative — and its cumulative, practically inevitable emotional wallop — without yielding much intimate human insight. “The Strangers’ Case” is expanded from the director’s Oscar-shortlisted 2020 short “Refugee,” which mapped out one of the story arcs depicted here, and indeed felt like a trailer of sorts for more expansive treatment.

But this multi-stranded construction feels ultimately like an omnibus of equivalent shorts spliced together, integrated via the film’s most questionable device: Each builds to a high-stakes cliffhanger answered by the next.