Review: ‘Strange Darling’ Makes Love S(l)ick
'Strange Darling' (2023)
There are very few surprises in a typical cat-and-mouse horror story. While kills are essential, the tropes are often repetitive and uninspired. However, writer/director J.T. Mollner’s grindhouse feature Strange Darling has a few tricks up its sleeve to elevate a story we’ve seen time and time again.
Despite debuting at Fantastic Fest 2023, the public was advised to approach this slasher deconstruction without prior knowledge. This secrecy made the film challenging for studios to market, as they struggled to promote it without revealing the twist. Eventually, the bloody thriller made it to the silver screen as Magenta Light Studios’ first feature film, shocking audiences with its slick style.
Told non-linearly in six chapters (with an epilogue that may have been unnecessary), Strange Darling evokes the volatile nature of low-budget thrillers from the past—the kind you could imagine a geeky cinephile obsessing over. Feeling like a love child between Pulp Fiction and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) distorts our reality and the brutality that has and will occur.
After a brief black-and-white vignette sets the stage for The Lady’s chase with The Demon (Kyle Gallner), who coyly smokes a cigarette when asked if he’s a serial killer, the story abruptly cuts to The Lady, bloodied and bruised to hell, running through a brightly lit field. We assume she’s running from The Demon, but we missed something thanks to the film’s structure. But what did we miss?
Instantly, Mollner traps us with intrigue.
Mollner doesn’t reveal the film’s best parts right away. Instead, he treats us to the tasty parts that play into horror tropes before unpacking the moral theme at the center of the film. In the opening chapter (Chapter 3), The Lady frantically looks back in the review mirror of the vintage Pinto as she speeds away from a souped-up Ford barreling down the road after her. The engines roar, the tires screech, the cocaine-fueled rage, and the worried glances in the rearview mirror build palpable tension. It's a sequence that feels ripped from the throat of Death Proof, but this is just the beginning.
The same level of tension returns in the next chapter (Chapter 5) as The Demon stalks through the mountain house of an eccentric hippy couple (Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.) with his rifle, shooting at an empty chest, teasing The Lady to come out of her hiding spot like an awry kitty cat while a dead body lies in the kitchen in a pool of blood. Mullner has beautifully crafted the final moments of a classic slasher-final-girl showdown.
But looks can be deceiving, which is why we are taken all the back from Chapter 5 five to Chapter 1.
Before going into the sleezy motel, The Lady hesitates under the glow of a neon moon, asking if they could drink and kiss in the truck for a while before citing that women have to be careful when they want to have a little fun. The Demon shakes his head, saying he never thought about that before, and the women in the audience scoffed. “Of course not,” we say, with a pit in our stomach, feeling like The Lady should trust her gut and run away. As the night fades into the morning, The Lady and The Demon role-play a violent fantasy of hers, turning the experience into an odd venture that feels unsafe for both parties.
In the next chapter (Chapter 4), it’s revealed that The Lady isn’t the victim after all. No, she is actually the threat, and this odd couple who uses far too much butter and sugary toppings to make a truly horrific breakfast sandwich has just invited her inside their home.
It’s a clever twist that relies on the non-linear structure and the societal belief that men cannot be victims to the female violence. It’s rare in mainstream cinema that an audience is asked to root for a man who fall prey to a violent woman, especially when he is set up to the be the killer enraged by the chase. In some ways, the movie “tricks us” by challenging our gender biases.
Fitzgerald’s and Gallner’s performances are what make the story and its structure work. Their chemistry—whether in a truck, sipping away the night, or in The Demon’s roaring rampage of revenge—plays into the audience’s biases with ease. Gallner’s face can harden to look like a killer, while Fitzgerald’s petite frame makes her seem like a woman who is unlikely to survive a physical fight. The real shock comes when you see what The Lady must do to make The Demon harmless.
In fact, The Demon is only named so because the story is told subjectively through the unreliable narration of The Lady. She reveals later on that she is on a heavenly mission to kill the demons of the world David Berkowitz-style, and hopes to go out in a blaze of glory.
It’s only when The Lady becomes a threat to the world that the camera starts treating her as larger than life, framing her in angles that give her command of the space. The vibrant world around her feels hot and suffocating, thanks to the warmth of 35mm film and the visual direction of first-time feature cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi.
The Lady gets her wish in the end after she sees herself, the bloodied and wired Lady, as one of the demons she has been trying so hard to eliminate. Acting on her final wish of death, The Lady takes a chance that an Oregon rancher will shoot her dead as she pulls out her gun to continue her murder spree. In a part of the world where everyone is likely to own a gun, The Lady bleeds out in the passenger seat of a truck as the world drains of color in an excruciating long oner.
Strange Darling is straightforward with its brutality and sensational themes, testing the endurance of the cast and crew with long shots that needed to be crafted with precision. However, the film struggles to maintain its slick visuals that keep the film interesting even when you can feel the story meandering.
Despite Mollner’s self-indulgent slate that ostentatiously announces the film was shot entirely on 35mm, there is a lack of experience that shows on screen, breaking the illusion that this film could add something more to its genre and the landscape of cinema. Many shots struggle to pull focus or smoothly push out of an intimate scene, jolting the frame for a millisecond. It happens frequently enough that it begins to pull the audience out of whatever is happening on screen. Fortunately, these moments mostly occur when characters are trying to find ways to kill time.
Ribisi’s superpower might not be his ability to work with film—an art form that has become harder to many to work with as digital becomes the main format for most movies. If Risbisi had more experience working with feature projects, a level of confidence could have been brought to the visual storytelling to add an additional level of storytelling to this rather surface level story.
However, Mollner and Ribisi come together to form a powerful duo that can create tension through contrast. From big blue neon signs and red-lit bathrooms to the grand sweeping landscapes of Oregon’s overbearing nature, reality is just suspended enough to pull audiences into the film’s world. The over-the-top style, further emphasized by editor Christopher Bell’s razor sharp edit, might make you think this movie is style-over-substance, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Strange Darling doesn’t push the genre into new territory but embraces the raw simplicity that doesn’t exist in the era of prestige horror films. Mollner doesn’t have much to say, but he wants to entertain. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
'Strange Darling' (2023)
Strange Darling suffers from ambition and a lack of experience behind the camera. The story doesn’t have enough substance to justify the runtime or the long, contemplative take on The Lady’s death. You can feel the film wants to take risks, and you encourage it in the darkness of the theater, but the team making the decisions doesn’t seem comfortable in their confidence to try something that may not work in the end.
Despite its limitations, the simplicity of Strange Darling is strangely refreshing. It knows what it wants to focus on and executes it with a level of precision that marks Mollner as a filmmaker to watch in the coming years. There’s a real talent for balancing tone and tension that oozes from his distinct style, which could make him a future master of horror once he learns to lean fully into his taste.
Grade: B-
