Review: Strange Darling

Director:  JT Mollner

Stars:  Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Steven Michael Quezada

Ahead of the main picture, Strange Darling boasts that it is shot ‘entirely on 35mm’. It is to the film’s credit; it looks gorgeous. But the effort to tell us so pridefully tees up a sense that director JT Mollner rather desperately wants to impress us. That this is followed immediately by a spoken word pre-amble over scrolling text that pointedly apes the opening of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre quickly positions Strange Darling as akin to the retro-fetishism of Quentin Tarantino. Slamming from here into a Death Proof-esque country car chase doesn’t exactly soften up that connection. Nor the foot-stuff later on…

Mollner’s film is a blisteringly engaging serial killer story slashed up into six a-chronological chapters and an epilogue (hi again, QT). It brashly opens mid-flow in Chapter 3, with Willa Fitzgerald’s unnamed heroine – The Woman – fleeing Kyle Gallner’s determined hunter – The Demon – down country roads, through a forest and to a picturesque secluded cottage. Already we have a feel for Mollner’s overripe kineticism. The Woman is dressed in bright red pyjamas making her pop hazardously against the foliage. The game of cat and mouse feels urgent and groundhouse-y. Her stop for a cigarette weirdly cavalier. As a genre exercise, this is self-consciously adept and it feels like Mollner wants us to recognise that.

Chapter 1 arrives third, so its a good 20 minutes into the picture before we’re presented context for how and why this life-or-death pursuit is happening, and even here Mollner enjoys turning the screws on our understanding and expectations. Strange Darling is frank and adult about the contracts and dangers of casual sex, frank and adult about female desire and the eroticism of a death wish, but it is also manipulative in how we are asked to feel and respond to violence in the bedroom. Gallner and Fitzgerald are great in dialogue exchanges that turn words into foreplay, but the more intimate scenes of their hookup are both volatile and uncomfortably deliberate. It feels, at times, as though Mollner is in control of us and we’ve forgotten the safe word.

But he’s not always in as much control as appears. There’s a level of over-confidence here that is sometimes Strange Darling‘s undoing. The very nature of its mixed-up timeline openly tips that there are secrets in the offering, and the ongoing manipulation of assumptions more or less primes us to solve Mollner’s riddle well before his script delivers the quite-obvious pay-offs.

That confidence is also frequently well-earned when it comes to the technical aspects, with immersive staging throughout that frankly – and enjoyably – feels like showing off. One of the most wicked surprises in the crew credits for Strange Darling is it’s DP. None other than seasoned character actor Giovanni Ribisi (also a producer). This is quite a flex from him as a visual stylist. Between them, Ribisi and Mollner ensure that – whatever else might be preoccupying us – Strange Darling is one of the year’s most gaudily attractive films (did they mention the use of 35mm?). That, combined with the screen magnetism of Fitzgerald and Gallner more or less make-up for the nagging sense that this is a rather hollow exercise.

Strange Darling strives for a different kind of female empowerment than we’re perhaps used to in genre offerings like this, but the execution feels haphazard and unintentionally confused. The Woman’s forthright assertion “I fucking deserve it” feels capable of playing both for and against the picture when investigating the wider story and its heavily gendered dynamics. Here, too, Mollner feels aligned with ol’ QT.

It’s a wild ride though and suckers for the pulpier end of horror/thriller hybrids will find much to relish in this bloody, twisty affair. On a surface level, Strange Darling hits the spot. A seedy, stylish rebuke to passivity at the movies and a possible star-maker for Fitzgerald.

One thing’s for sure; you’ll never hear “Love Hurts” quite them same again.