2024 | rated R | starring Kyle Gallner, Willa Fitzgerald | written and directed by JT Mollner | 1h 37m | 2 1/2 out of 5 stars |
{Contains Spoilers}
JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is a movie that’s entire existence was conceived and executed as a twist machine. There are movies where the story and theme goes hand-in-hand with a non-linear or Rashomon POV style. And then there are movies where an otherwise straightforward story is chopped up and re-arranged to create a puzzle for the viewer because the material doesn’t hold audience attention on its own. Darling doesn’t feel manipulative, but it does feel like a stunt that sacrifices character and suspense for twists.
Strange Darling is told in 6 parts. We start in chapter 4 and cycle up and down from there. It opens with a woman, known as The Lady (Willa Fitgerald, Scream: The Series) behind the wheel of a car in a desperate, harrowing escape from a maniac (Kyle Gallner, Scream V) in a pickup. The chase sends her into the woods and ultimately to a house to hide out as he stalks her with a shotgun. Flashback. Flashforward. Flashback again. All to turn every expectation we have about this initial set-up on its head. You’ll guess the twist before Mollner’s self satisfied reveal.
I’m going to barely dance around the rest of this, but not by a lot.
Strange Darling attempts to interrogate gender dynamics in the horror genre but has nothing new to say on the matter. It exists in a world before Gone Girl, when Gillian Flynn turned the female villain from witches and tormented supernatural creatures into the the pretty girl next door or your own wife. In the past a female villain was given a relatable tragic backstory that formed what she was and if she was killed it was gently and/or off screen. You still sympathized with her. Gone Girl changed that. It gave us a villain that duped us and was an ice cold psychopath. The twist relied entirely on our preconceived ideas that women could not be such things. The pop culture has attempted to reverse this as much as possible. 2024 gave us a Netflix documentary, America Nightmare, that sold us the true story of a California crime where the police were supposedly so influence by Gone Girl that they dared to accuse the missing wife of being behind her own disappearance. I so despised American Nightmare because it does it’s damnedest to depict Flynn’s thriller as a mistake and to “rectify” women’s place in pop culture as perpetual victims. If it sounds like I’ve gone off topic here, rest assured, all of this relates to Strange Darling and how the movie hangs a lantern on every move it makes around the one-night-stand relationship between Fitgerald and Gallner’s unnamed characters.
The movie plays heavily with role playing kinks, a married couple (Ed Bagely Jr. and Barbara Hershey) who takes in the young runaway and two cops who come across a crime scene and jump to assessing the victim and perpetrator based on gender. I’m all for this kind of gender dynamic interrogation. This movie even works in fits and starts. However, the gap between how unoriginal all this is and how unique Mollner seems to think it is, is all too vast to ignore. If it were the set-up to a richer character story between these two, that would have been excellent, but as the movie rolls into it’s third act it’s clear that Mollner has nothing else in the chamber.
It’s not as much a movie with characters as a puzzle and it’s a puzzle we’ve solved before – and better.