Strange Darling opens with a text crawl (narrated by Jason Patric) that explicitly harkens back to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nonetheless, writer/director JT Mollner’s feature debut teases conventionality while flipping expectations at every turn, delivering a fractured tale of desire, deceit, and the dark hearts that roam this wide-open country.
Ruthlessly surprising and uncompromising—and thus best seen with as little prior knowledge as possible—it’s an electric thriller with blood on its hands, flesh in its mouth, and deviance on its mind.
(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)
Shot entirely on 35mm film (as it announces via a title card) by actor Giovanni Ribisi, who additionally cameos, Strange Darling, which hits theaters August 23, bewilders, first and foremost, through chronological fragmentation.
Patric’s introduction sets the ominous scene: Between 2018-2020, America’s most prolific serial killer embarked on a multi-state slaughter from Colorado to Oregon, and this saga is the final chapter of that spree. This context is preceded by the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) asking the Demon (Kyle Gallner) if he’s a serial killer, followed by a slow-mo credit sequence in which the Lady flees across a field, her lip fat, her blonde hair messy, and her ear mangled. These two clips suggest an outline for the mayhem to come, but Mollner implies this only so he can pull the rug out from beneath his audience, as he immediately does by jumping to the third of his story’s six chapters, with the Lady speeding down a rural road in a ’78 Pinto as the Demon pursues in a big black pick-up.
Strange Darling
MiramaxBeginning in the thick of things, Strange Darling stymies easy readings from the start, and that continues as the Demon—a mustached young man in a black-and-red flannel jacket, black T-shirt, and sunglasses—thwarts the Lady’s automotive getaway, thereby initiating a chase through the woods. Stifling a scream as she cleanses her gory ear wound with a (fortuitously discovered) bottle of vodka, her face contorting and her body trembling as she bites down on her shirt, the Lady makes her way to a forested cabin that’s surrounded by speakers (on wooden posts) that blare broadcasts about Bigfoot.
There, she’s greeted by a couple (Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.) who only refer to themselves as “mamma” and “papa,” and who will later self-identify not as “mountain people” but as “old hippies.” Yet before this encounter can fully play out, the film leaps ahead to its fifth chapter (“Here, Kitty, Kitty…”), in which the Demon, his rifle at the ready, stalks through this same house searching for the Lady, who’s hiding in a dark enclosure illuminated only by her cigarette lighter.
Strange Darling so overtly leans into the idea that the Demon is a serial killer and the Lady is his latest victim that it’s almost impossible not to wonder if perhaps the opposite is true. Mollner intends to trap viewers between those two ideas, and he intimates both realities at different junctures by sharply moving between the past, present, and future. Snippets of information are at once revealing and untrustworthy, as the filmmaker deliberately misleads through formal splintering as well as characters who are engaged in similar types of performance. At the same time, he color-codes his material in intriguing fashion, most notably with red, which is seen in everything from the hippies’ wallpaper and the Lady’s panties and outfit to a cramped bathroom and the taillights on the Demon’s vehicle.
If Strange Darling is stained in crimson, its most seductive scene occurs in lush blues courtesy of a sign for the Blue Angel Motel, outside of which the Demon and Lady (she in a red wig) sit in his truck, flirtatiously discussing whether they’re going to get a room together. Throughout this candid exchange, some of which Mollner has already depicted, the details of their relationship emerge in bits and pieces, with the Lady making clear that “the real issue is safety,” since “violence—that’s no joke. That’s life or death.” The ensuing sight of the Demon strangling the Lady on a bed is also something of a repeat image, albeit now cast in a decidedly new light. Consent is merely one of many elements to be warped and manipulated to one’s advantage in this eroticized dance, with power and lust lethally coiled around each other.
Pulling off this sort of cat-and-mouse game requires Mollner to continually shock through twisty-y revelations and right-turns. Fortunately, the writer/director exhibits a steady hand throughout his sophomore behind-the-camera outing, heightening tension through a careful balance of abrupt narrative and tonal shifts, an uneasy marriage of malevolent action and lyrical music (courtesy of Z Berg), and long serpentine takes that radiate menace. Deftly composed, the film whiplashes to and fro without ever losing its forward thrust, and its aesthetics boast an eerie, sultry verve that’s epitomized by recurring use of the song, “Love Hurts.”
Ultimately, Strange Darling hums because Fitzgerald and Gallner expertly walk a fine line between innocent and deadly. Alternately sweet and sadistic (not to mention sadomasochistic), both actors captivate through canny withholding, their characters entrancing in large part because it’s impossible to get a complete read on them. Even if one guesses the true nature of this tête-à-tête, Fitzgerald’s sensuality and vulnerability is matched by enough perversion, and Gallner’s cold-blooded intensity is laced with enough aww-shucks joviality, to keep the proceedings pleasurably edgy.
It’s only in the film’s last third that concrete answers are provided, and while they neuter some of the preceding guessing-game anxiety, they’re followed by additional ruses that are in keeping with this nightmare’s fixation on duplicity.
Between its dreamy close-ups, overhead compositions, non-linear editing, and instances of black-and-white cinematography, Strange Darling puts an emphasis on style, and yet it always uses its showy devices as mechanisms for suspense.
Moreover, its sinister romanticism is paired with a bracingly bleak outlook on the possibility of honesty, communion, and escape. Never biting off more than it can chew—and, on at least one occasion, spitting out what it doesn’t want to swallow—Mollner’s calling-card affair is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, concealing its monstrous beneath a raft of well-known threads, the better to startle and devour.
