JT Mollner’s thriller “Strange Darling” feels shorter than 96 minutes. It breezes through its six chapters (and epilogue) with an impish excitement, teasingly daring audiences to guess what new twist might be waiting in store. The breeziness comes from the way it maintains its thrills throughout its running-time, turning its cat-and-mouse case of a murder-on-the-run into a nonlinear guessing game of whodunit but also why, and how. Within its thrills, though, “Strange Darling” is also closely checked into a deliciously nasty humorous streak that sustains it for its duration and decisively establishes it as one of the more satisfying indie romps of the year.
I ambled into “Strange Darling” after a late-night walk to the cinema with no foreknowledge of what lay in store for me. The brief running-time and some evening restlessness prompted my visit, and when I walked out 90 minutes later the first time (I saw it again weeks later, this time with a friend in tow) I found myself unnerved and delighted and unable to throw off its lurid mix of R-rated vulgarity, cleverness, silliness, and eroticism. If any of this sounds compelling, and if you are one to be thrilled by bloody rampages, I would encourage you to stop reading any further and stream “Strange Darling” from the comfort of your homes with all the lights off. The primary reason I have waited so long to write about it since its August release is because I recognised that part of its striking pleasure comes from the absence of any foreknowledge. “Strange Darling” sets up a masterfully crafted gambit both for how it subverts, and confirms, to expectations of the genre.
Horror and thrillers have been a safe bet at the box-office in this unpredictable year for the movies, but I have found myself generally – thus far, at least – less compelled by what 2024 has had to offer. Too many films of this ilk have depended too much on formal or thematic gestures to the past or to other media, and even when “Strange Darling” might be in conversation with other works of its genre, it is defiantly committed to being its own thing from its opening crawl that announces that it is shot in 35mm. That bit of information is, technically, unrelated to the film at hand. Yet it feels like a natural part of the grinning audaciousness, and even boastfulness, with which Mollner approaches this world. Lucky for him, and especially lucky for us the audience, “Strange Darling” is operating with levels of technical proficiency that become essential to its emotional thrusts and swerves.
The opening crawl imitates a film based on real events when it announces that the images we are about to see are a condensed account of the last known exploits of a serial killer’s years-long murder spree. This is all fictional, however. But the ostensible seriousness with which Mollner (both director and writer) approaches this bit of information is a window into the ways “Strange Darling” operates like a kind of chamber-piece in a way, even as it begins to gesture at the world in increasingly unsettling ways. Large sections of the film feature only two characters – the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) and the Demon (Kyle Gallner) whose names are featured in an early title-sequence set to Z Berg and Keith Carradine’s cover of “Love Hurts” which pops up throughout the film to both humorous and unnerving effect. The song, like the names of the characters, are bits of misdirection. Just like the fact that the film opens with a few images of violence that are not quite what they seem to be.
The misdirection is central to the conceit of the game playing that defines much of “Strange Darling”, both in its actual diegesis and in the metafictional way Mollner is playing with what we might expect from a film with this logline. The six chapters of the film are delivered in scrambled order and when we meet the Lady being chased by the Demon we are already in Chapter 3 with no sense as to what has brought them to this point. We only get to Chapter 1 midway through. It’s the kind of structural effect that’s baked into the drama that reflects a film tightly bound to its own fictionality and structure. Frustratingly and deliciously so. There’s a nastily enticing charm to the way it plays out its subversions, which are not quite unpredictable but offer great latitude for Gallner and Fitzgerald to deliver performances that play on stereotypes of men and women in these kinds of films, while offering both performers several moments to establish their talents. Gallner is all masculine energy and Fitzgerald is moving through varying iterations of final-girl and sexpot. Mollner owes a lot to the way both can command the screen for great stretches with no one else in the frame.
When the “twist” is revealed halfway through, “Strange Darling” keeps its tautness going by making itself dependent on more than just the twistiness of the set-up. It’s less of a question of the audience not knowing who to root for, and more a case of “Strange Darling” earning effect with its increasingly ambivalent presentation of a contemporary world gone to seedy rot that begins to take hold of the film’s ethos. This is life in western United States, it tells us, except Mollner is smart enough not to be too heavy-handed with the metaphors. This could be any rural place in America, but “Strange Darling” is less interested in proselytising. When it brings up religion as a thrumming part of the thrills, it’s with enough of a remove to urge audiences to do their own sleuthing without flattening the possibilities of reading something deeper, and meaner, into its sinew. By keeping itself tightly focused on its main duo, we believe in the world of the film because we believe in Gallner and Fitzgerald and the supporting cast who appear briefly but vividly (Barbara Hershey in particular is a delight).
I can see how some ungenerous readings of sexual and gender politics might be extracted from its foray into human interaction, but there’s an unceasingly paradoxical mix of the silly and the lurid at work, often in tandem, that suggest that this film is more attuned to its absurdities than it might get credit for. And within that absurdity, there are kernels of discomfiting truths that left audience members on both showings unsure whether to laugh or gasp at some of the more heightened moments of chaos. I was left charmed by a film so committed to its own interiority. The way Giovanni Ribisi’s camera shoots everything – from bodies to food to open plains – displays an eroticism that is almost uncomfortable. There is the way that Craig DeLeon’s music refuses to let up on its chilling atonality; or the sharp vicissitudes of Christopher Robin Bell’s editing that are Mollner’s best asset in making the nonlinearity intriguing but never confusing.
For all its lurid ostentatiousness, there is something lingering below the surface of “Strange Darling” that restlessly nods to a provocative survey of American modern life. When an Indigenous woman appears in the epilogue, her presence feels meaningfully tapped into competing histories of America’s relationship with Native America and womanhood that feel ripe for discussion. But even absent of any kind of sociological reading, the full thrust of kinetic thrills here is an enticing 90-minute ride of excess that will keep me thinking of “Strange Darling” for months to come.
Strange Darling is available for purchase or rent on AppleTV, Google Play Movies and elsewhere online