We talk about subverting expectations a lot in the realm of genre cinema, particularly where horror films and crime thrillers are concerned. We talk about these things because there are rules to these genres, certain skeletal essentials that we’ve come to expect, and when you subvert those things, you’re theoretically throwing the viewer for a well-earned loop. We like to know the rules because we like the thrill of breaking them.
But subverting expectations can only take you so far. Eventually, we all know the rules so well that we can see the breaks coming, no matter how carefully a film tries to hide them. We’re trained to look not just for genre conventions, but for deviations from that convention, and a culture devoted to spoilers and fan theories and “solving” movies by guessing twists certainly doesn’t help with that.
On the surface, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling may appear to be a film that’s built entirely around subverting expectations. Its nonlinear storytelling style and tightly focused premise suggest a film that’s supposed to keep us guessing, to generate hypotheses with each new frame, then swerve on the viewer at the last possible moment. But to focus entirely on its twisty nature is to miss the point of Mollner’s vivid, hypnotic, darkly funny thrill ride. This is not a movie about your expectations. This is a movie about a vision, executed with earnestness and force by a great creative team, and the results speak for themselves.
The film follows a woman known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) and a man known only as The Demon (Kyle Gallner) as they encounter each other for what seems like a one-night stand. But as their enigmatic names suggest, something else is going on between these two people, whose backgrounds and motivations we don’t know. Throw in a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-inspired opening narration about a notorious serial killer who remains nameless, and we’re thrust into a world where violence is perpetually lurking at the edge of the frame, until it spills over and consumes the narrative.
I’m being as vague as I can here because Strange Darling is the kind of movie best experienced when you don’t know a lot about it. I personally knew virtually nothing about the film other than the recommendations of friends who caught it at Fantastic Fest last year, and the promising nature of the cast, so I’m trying to preserve that as much as I can while also talking about the film’s virtues. There are secrets, yes, and big plot developments that you won’t want spoiled going in, so you should definitely avoid learning too much about the movie before you see it, but I don’t offer that warning just because of some vague notion of preserving spoilers for an audience. You see, Strange Darling isn’t so much about what twists it has in store as it is about how those twists come through.
Told through six nonlinear chapters which gleefully dance across the movie’s timeline, Strange Darling is a film that wants to surprise and shock you, but not necessarily in the way you think. Mollner’s plotting is smart, devilish, and tight, keeping the film at a lean 90 minutes, but his thematic explorations within that plotting are the bigger story here. The narrative unfolds like a poisonous tropical flower, never revealing which new petal is going to open until it starts moving, and by the end you’re left with a beautiful, deadly whole while also having had the satisfaction of watching each little piece shift into place. Those pieces, dripping with syrupy tension, are often not about guessing what’s next, but about exploring our human capacity for violence in the context of two humans who might be on opposite sides of a binary, or might be cut from the same blood-red cloth.
The very conceit of the film places Fitzgerald and Gallner firmly in the center of the entire narrative, and Mollner’s deliberately shadowy scripting leaves them to fill in the details of their characters behind the eyes as the film slowly reveals who they are. These characters have to breathe life into the dark corners of every scene in this film, and the actors have to make them compelling enough that we’ll want to stick around and learn the truth of what’s happening. Fitzgerald, who you might best know from her streaming work on shows like Reacher and The Fall of the House of Usher, is absolutely, devastatingly gripping as The Lady, turning in one of the best performances of the year in any genre, full-stop. Gallner, long a staple of the horror circuit, reminds us all why he’s one of the most dependable thriller actors we’ve got, while stretching his own capabilities to give us a chameleonic, masterful performance. They’re both titanic presences in this film, a fact underscored by the scenes they share with the likes of Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey, who both add quirky depth all their own.
The other major character in Mollner’s film, just as vivid and vital as the humans, is the camera, under the command of cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi). Strange Darling was shot entirely on 35mm film, and you know from the very first scene that it’s more than just a throwback for the sake of making cinephiles salivate. Mollner and Ribisi’s use of color, of perspective, of the simple way that light behaves when it’s captured on good old-fashioned celluloid, is astonishing, and a reminder that there’s a certain life to film that digital can rarely recapture no matter how great it looks. It’s a strong contender for the year’s most beautiful genre movie, and that’s just one of many reasons to check it out.
Strange Darling is a snarling beast of a movie, a film that prowls around your psyche until it’s ready to pounce, and by the time it leaps at you you’re so transfixed by its beauty that you don’t really mind. It’s a smart, seductive, first-rate thriller, and demands to be seen by genre fans everywhere.
Strange Darling is in theaters August 23rd.
