Film Review
Strange Darling (2023) — crime horror flick aims high and gets a stitch
Nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer’s vicious murder spree.
Having made only two features so far, you can already sense JT Mollner’s refractory temperament. His style is shock value to the nines, but primordial, with too much room for growth. He knows better than to go for the low-hanging fruits like Damien Leone (Terrifier), but still, you’re constantly reminded of how eager he is to stun-lock you silly with absurd violence and contrivances. Growing up with the films of Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, what drew Mollner to directing movies must have been his afflictions from seeing them — one does not come away unscathed experiencing Full Metal Jacket (1987) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968) at a young age. As you witness his narratives unfold, in your mind forms a picture of his rapturous face, staring down on you as he pulls your nerves in any direction he pleases; he’s on cloud nine with the whip hand.
The opening credits slow-motion shot — of a blonde “Lady” (Willa Fitzgerald) in glaring rose red and blood red, with black eyeliners washed down by tears, hurtling towards us as the music sings her elegy — signifies Strange Darling’s two-faced scheme: her image shifts in and out of focus, and intermittently hides behind the massive title cards. You can’t immediately sense that something else is going on, but a feeling of distance and opacity registers subliminally. Opening in the vrooms of a black truck and a red Pinto, an incel-coded alpha male (Kyle Gallner) ruthlessly pursues her with a rifle. He chases her into the woods, only for her to discover and seek refuge in an old hippie couple’s remote farmhouse. The action so far moves at full tilt, with droning guitar sounds hammering our eardrums whenever the predator — named “the Demon” — appears on screen, but the movie itself has yet to take off. You could practically hear your own whisper: “You’re in for a ride.”
The film’s strategy of dodging the curse of predictability involves more than the non-linear narrative (it opens in the third of its six chapters), unexpected twists on character roles, the card-holding players conscious of their power positions and hiding behind their sleeves, and other such Tarantino hand-me-downs. By placing you right in the heat of the action, it misleads your moral judgment by stripping you of context and filling you up with adrenaline. Clarity is held back, as your intuition is being toyed with, which by itself isn’t anything new, but here the information withheld is used to turn the usual predator-prey dynamic on its head; if you’re not one step ahead of the film, you’re bound to lose your balance. For the first half of it, our heroine is placed on the defendant’s seat time and again for us to second-guess our sympathies and identifications, but her true nature doesn’t take shape, not until everything’s too late.
This encrusted spectacle of deceits and transgressions will no doubt become a source of fascination for a lot of horror consumers. Trained in the substandard plotting and acting of standard horror films, they know to prime themselves not to read the characters intimately and psychologically, lest they refuse to be turned on. Mollner knows that the material doesn’t belong in the same class as Cure (1997), Hereditary (2018), or Speak No Evil (2022), so he takes what most horror flicks fail — the emotional vacuity of the characters as a result of the actors’ blandness or gaudiness — and turns that into an advantage.
Fitzgerald and Gallner’s acting isn’t particularly remarkable or out of left field, but that’s just it. We couldn’t tell from the beginning cat-and-mouse anything other than a female victim and a vicious male predator (there’s no emotional subtext to suggest they’re more than what they initially appear to be), so we proceed from prejudicial assumptions based on what we know from Halloween (1978) and The Shining (1980). Mollner is an obsessive gaslighter. In hindsight, it should have seemed obvious what twist he had in store for us, but at the moment, you couldn’t guess anything with confidence. And when the big reveals come, he times them just right to make you gasp. It’s only pettily clever, but you’ll have a hard time denying how much of it worked on you.
Indie horror has always been so full of conceits and ideas, and so lacking in the taste and experience required to make them cohere, and 2024 is no exception. Just to name a few: Longlegs, Oddity, MaXXXine, Cuckoo, Blink Twice, and Exhuma. Like the rest of them, Strange Darling’s one reason for existence is to stagger you. It irks you here and there as you’re reminded of how desperately the movie wants to impress you, even though parts of it did succeed. However, what made it stand out from the rest of them, which is also what prevented it from elevating further into a work of art, is how successful Mollner was in sustaining the illusion that there is more to it than what it lets on.
He’s found just as many conceits of sadomasochistic sex to play with as Fede Álvarez did empty tricks and overripe set pieces in Alien: Romulus (2024). The idea is that loveless sex inevitably evolves into a mutual playing with fire — the threat of real injury and death is more titillating than erotic affection — and that whatever violence that follows is only a matter of it getting too “real”. It wasn’t until the end when the Lady’s gaze into herself in the mirror, bruised and bloodied, that the film finally slips up and reveals its emotional falseness. As with all inchoate conceits, a let-up shatters the Magic Mirror’s glass. Those in the audience still unwilling to let go of that illusion might wonder: to what advantage was doing what she did at the very end? Was she tired of playing her own game? Was it self-hatred?
What’s more bemusing, however, is how Mollner, so far in his output, has inherited some of the worst attributes of his influences without ingesting the best. As airless and stately as some of Polanski and most of older Kubrick were, they both had an impeccable comic impulse that electrified the likes of Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Cul-de-sac (1966) early in their careers. Even when they stagnate in the piety of their later works, some of their gallows humour comes through and stirs up the stew. Having mastered the trade of narrative trickery and disturbing imagery, Mollner lacks the comedic lustre he needs for savour. He suppresses every chance Strange Darling has for humour — from the eccentricities of the old hippies to the Lady’s distraught reactions to any suggestion of involving the police. One cannot help but think back to early Brian De Palma, a fellow horror stylist to whom Mollner paid homage with a split-diopter shot, and how stark the contrast is between Mollner’s impotence and De Palma’s gargoyle grin.
In Sisters (1972), Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), and Dressed to Kill (1980), De Palma practically scores off every trope in the playbook and wears them on his “self-awareness” hat, and then goes on to make them work wonders anyway like a sneering circus magician in a long black cloak doing a Selbit jigsaw trick. You want to hold back your laughter as you shiver through the black-and-white memory of the deceased sister implanted by William Finley’s Emil, but can’t. Nor did the cartoonishly timed lightning strike during dinner take anything away from Piper Laurie’s imposing presence as Carrie White’s religiously fanatical mother. It’s an uncanny sense of play that later gets picked up by David Lynch — from the dancing whore witnessing torture in Blue Velvet (1986) to Andy’s head-slicing death by the glass table in Lost Highway (1997) — and a whole string of horror filmmakers, to varying degrees of success and failures. And there’s not even a hint at such an impishness in Strange Darling, even though it would suit this movie’s exuberance of style and lack of substance.
Mollner refuses you refuge by staying humourless, but he doesn’t compensate with anything else either. A former actor tired of following others’ orders and visions, he has finally managed to direct his first feature: Outlaws and Angels (2016), a much slower and drier western pastiche of The Hateful Eight (2015), with a coat of paint lifted out of The Proposition (2005). Strange Darling’s play with the concept of innocence and evil, particularly the indeterminate grey area in between, started here, but it does not live up to the task it sets for itself, nor does his new one. Mollner knows the craft of storytelling well enough to blend the themes in with the narrative and the Western setting seamlessly, barring shades of anachronistic morality and an exposition that came out of nowhere. But the story — of a gang of outlaws escaping from the authorities and bounty hunters, and coming upon a remote house and a religious family of four on their way to Mexico (sounds familiar?) — has a ‘movie logic’ embedded in it that undermines its fancy for seriousness. When the film preaches to you outright about innocence and violence, you want to laugh, but it won’t let you.
Plodding into the second half, we find the pensive-seeming heroine (Francesca Eastwood) loosening her screws, putting a bullet in her sister’s head, torturing her dad with the stock of a rifle, then chopping off the wanted gang’s heads with an axe for prize winnings, all the while remaining mostly cool and calm. The film tries its best to dramatize the psychology behind her anti-villainous actions and blames her sudden betrayal of her sternly Christian family on her dad’s incestual relationship with her, something which we’re told but not shown. But she’s an impenetrable barrier anyway, because, like Todd Phillips, Osgood Perkins, and other artist-wannabes, Mollner’s twists and contrivances are built for the sake of twists and contrivances; they aren’t meant to make sense logically or psychologically. They’re dreams and fantasies of the creatively insecure, astutely designed to catch you off guard and take the wind out of your sails, with the intent of convincing us of their “strengths” and “talents”; the Route 66 of the artistically inexperienced.
The violence in the latter half of Outlaws and Angels is so absurd, so inconsistent, that you’re compelled to conclude that the heroine is just psychotic. Mollner laboriously constructs an illusion of depth around her and her gang leader partner (Chad Michael Murray), who defends her against his gang after she shoots him down near the end, but you fail to detect any emotional subtext to justify it. He might as well have just said, “Look what the world made her do”. If he did say anything with this and Strange Darling, it’s that “evil people are callously deep, and innocent people are detestably shallow.”
Pure cinéastes are both a pitiful and an admirable lot: admiration in their pluck, pity in their myopia. Mollner seems to be so impressed with his work that the first frame of Strange Darling is the picture announcing that it was shot entirely on 35mm. If one didn’t know better, they might have assumed he was taking the piss out of himself. It was Pauline Kael who said, “Movies by themselves are not enough of an education.” As film technology gets more accessible and easier to domesticate by the day, young filmmakers flood the indie film market with works that increasingly recall one another. So long the era of Orson Welles and early Francis Ford Coppola, who were also fluent in the language of literature, operas, and plays, filmmakers like John Carpenter and Quentin Tarantino are now the dominant species: even the genuine successes are trapped within their own limitations.
Take Blink Twice. Zoë Kravitz does a serviceable job as a debut filmmaker, but you get the eerie feeling that what she’s done is pick out inklings and residues of Get Out (2017), Don’t Worry Darling (2022), The Menu (2022), Triangle of Sadness (2022), Saltburn (2023), and Ready or Not (2019) — a lot of which already look and think alike — mashing them up together and you get this confused faux-commentary on wealth, corruption, and sexual predation, undone further by a revenge fantasy ending. What’s more eerie about Blink Twice isn’t the movie itself though, but that you remember undergoing the same déjà vu seeing Longlegs, which plagiarises Cure and Kubrick, Abigail (2024), a half-witted rehash of Ready or Not, Immaculate (2024), which shares the same skeleton of a premise with The First Omen (2024) from the same year, and countless others.
Strange Darling may have the look of a new invention within this barren landscape, but in essence, it’s only a retread of David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma in a metamodern shading, without the same charms or creativity. It doesn’t help that its colour theory is too on the nose, either. We get it: red symbolises the simultaneity of danger, love, life, sex, power, and whatever else that makes sense, but the specific selection is too one-note to be narrowed down. And while that broadness of possible subliminal interpretations has exactly the impact the film’s looking for (our vertigo from the lack of clarity and focus), it jars you nonetheless, because there’s no taste, no flavour.
Anyhow, I guess what it all comes down to is: “dog died, fish died, cat died, mum died, dad died, house got burned down, train got derailed, plane crashed… but someone’s having fun.”
But is that “someone” us?
USA | 2023 | 96 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
writer & director: JT Mollner.
starring: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley Jr.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on September 18, 2024. All copyrighted images are used according to the Fair Use doctrine in US & UK law.
