Wait… What?
Somebody in JT Moller’s second film fucked around and found out. It’s just not clear who.
Strange Darling
Director: JT Mollner • Writer: JT Mollner
Starring: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Barbara Hershey, Ed Begley Jr
USA • 1hr 37mins
Opens Hong Kong Dec 5 • III
Grade: A-
This is going to be the vaguest, shortest, least informative rave review of the year, because the less you know about JT Mollner’s brilliantly confronting serial killer thriller Strange Darling going into it the better. I’m not joking: don’t read the Wiki summary, don’t look at online commentaries that debate its finer points. I’m not even sure you should look at that trailer.
Let’s just get to it: The films starts by declaring that it’s a dramatisation of the final days in a serial killer’s rampage (a nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre no doubt), one that ended on the west coast of the US. Mollner then proceeds to tell us that story in six non-linear chapters, starting with Chapter 3, in which we see a young woman, credited only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald, Reacher’s Roscoe) emerging from the Oregon woods, desperate, running for her life. The upshot is that she’s ditched her Pinto – a true classic ride – on the highway after being chased and run off the road by a coked up dude in a giant truck with a high-powered rifle, identified only as The Demon (Kyle Gallner, Scream). What follows is a ingenious spin on the old-fashioned cat-and-mouse thriller for the 2020s, that probes issues of toxicity, gender norms, consent and bias and blows up our notions of them, or at least challenges them. If you don’t leave the theatre chastising yourself for making precisely the leaps Mollner expects, you weren’t paying attention – and you haven’t been paying attention to the world around you either.
What does this say?
Strange Darling is a visual exercise as well, with Mollner honing some of the skills and devices he took for a test drive on his first film, the similarly themed western Outlaws and Angels (which starred Francesca Eastwood, yeah, Clint’s daughter, herself the living embodiment of Darling’s themes), and in many ways he plays with the conventions of horror (Mollner is writing the adaptation of obscure Stephen King story “The Long Walk”), and finds ways to marry them to a killer thriller that may also be a twisted romance and still shit all over their conceits. Many are going to brush the film off as an exercise in style over substance, particularly as actor Giovanni Ribisi – the same Giovanni Ribisi from Avatar and Saving Private Ryan – turns up as producer and cinematographer (!), shooting in 35mm no less, ever so slightly accentuating the grindhouse elements; Strange Darling is garishly red, blue and neon, grainy and knows exactly when to drop a split diopter. But the style is in service to the story and it’s entirely necessary considering so much of the occasionally squirm-inducing action that has nothing to do with blood and guts is designed to make us question what we’re seeing.
It’s audacious to be sure, and I hate sounding so shady, but Strange Darling works best in a void. What can be said – and should be said loudly – is that Fitzgerald absolutely crushes it in a literally star-making performance that walks a tightrope between clever and simply caustic; Mollner looks like an asshole without her perfectly calibrated performance as a young woman who just wants to have some fun. By the same token, Gallner has the thankless role of the antagonist, but one upon which the film rests in as many ways as it does Fitzgerald’s turn. If he blows it, if we never empathise with him on some level, Mollner’s delicate house of cards collapses. It’s all very precarious anyway because really? Put this in chronological order and it’s as rote as it gets.
Though the film focuses mostly on The Lady and The Demon, Ed Begley Jr and Barbara Hershey turn up as Frederick and Genevieve, a “couple of old hippies” with arguably the world’s worst breakfast habits and bring with them some of the film’s humour. Uh-huh. It’s funny. Strange Darling runs out of steam a tiny bit in the third act (really, it could only go on for so long) and by the time cop partners Pete and Tanya (Breaking Bad’s Steven Michael Quezada and Bianca Santos) show up the script has started showing signs of buckling under its own premise. Still, the net benefits heavily outweigh the flaws, and it’s one of the few films in recent memory that benefits from a second viewing. After you figure out what’s going on it’s a kick to go back and see where the hints are. Credit to Mollner: He never cheats. And the second viewing is fun – not mandatory. Looking at you, Nolan.