The tricky thriller mindfuck “Strange darling“ looks back on an eventful production history: after filming began, the financiers not only demanded that the main actress, Willa Fitzgerald, be recast, but also interrupted production for several days because of their dissatisfaction with the material delivered. Due to budget constraints, a complex sequence in a river could not be filmed. But as if that weren't enough “traumatic experiences” for director and screenwriter JT Mollner (“Outlaws And Angels”), as he admitted in a podcast, the production company Miramax also hired a new editor behind his back to make the finale to change the cut version.
The producers' goal: to assemble the six chapters of the story, between which the thriller jumps back and forth, in strict chronological order, contrary to the original vision. It's good that this didn't happen after the original version's strong results in test screenings. After all, the narrative style, which initially seems arbitrary, is the real joke of this independent gem with grindhouse leanings, which, precisely because of the unusual chapter structure, has a big surprise in store for the audience with great potential for discussion. For this reason, it's not just horror maestro Stephen King who is already hailing the film as a “clever masterpiece”.
She (Willa Fitzgerald) has barely escaped her pursuer, but he remains hot on her trail.
A nameless woman (Willa Fitzgerald) flees in fear of her life in a car from a man with a gun (Kyle Gallner), simply known as “The Demon”. After an accident, the game of cat and mouse continues in a forest. The panicked young woman finds the remote home of Frederick (Ed Begley Jr.) and Genevieve (Barbara Hersehy). The old hippie couple only reluctantly gives her shelter – but the pursuer doesn't wait long…
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In his second directorial work, JT Mollner jumps straight into the third chapter of his story after a text panel about a serial killer who is said to have been up to mischief between 2018 and 2020, as well as a short escape scene to an acoustic cover version of the Nazareth hit “Love Hurts”. Only later does he return to the beginning to gradually reveal the background to the initially contextless hunt. It is not only the division of the film into pointedly named chapters as well as some particularly grotesquely bloody peaks of violence that justify the comparison to the works of “Pulp Fiction” mastermind Quentin Tarantino:
The master director, who was influenced by the train station cinema of the 1970s, is ultimately known for still shooting on analogue film material. “Strange Darling” was also shot entirely on 35mm material by none other than actor Giovanni Ribisi (“Horizon”), who is making his debut as a cinematographer here. The grainy images in rich colors are just as reminiscent of the heyday of the grindhouse genre as the bright red Ford Pinto as the woman's getaway vehicle. In any case, red is conspicuously present in many scenes in order to underline the dangerous situation fueled by all kinds of passions.
Copied from one of the greats
Quentin Tarantino used, among other things, in “Jackie Brown” and “The Hateful Eight” a so-called “split diopter” camera lens, which enables two different focus ranges in one setting. In “Strange Darling” such a lens is used in a particularly perfidious scene in which a different powdery drug is dosed in the foreground than the victim lying on the bed in the background expects. With such visual gimmicks and allusions, “Strange Darling” is a veritable grab bag that works best without much prior knowledge. The concept of the film is based primarily on its (initially) seemingly arbitrary narrative structure. An essential (and also significant for a film review) twist is cleverly left out until the end of the first half of the film.
If you don't want to be spoiled, you should skip the next paragraph and jump to the conclusion!
JT Mollner skillfully plays with the audience's expectations in dialogues about an instant serial killer and in choking games in bed. Kyle Gallner (“Smile”), with his lumberjack shirt, mustache and gruff, dumb demeanor, simply fits the image of a redneck killer too well. And who would doubt the innocence of the delicate, fragile woman given Willa Fitzgerald's tearful and emotional performance (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) with her ear bleeding profusely?
But it is precisely these (too) quickly accepted gender and role clichés that Mollner takes into account and, with full of chutzpah, turns them inside out, which can be understood as a finger in pretty much every direction, whether #MeToo or its countermovement. (The fact that the production company Miramax was run for a long time by Harvey Weinstein, against whom numerous lawsuits for rape and sexual abuse were and are ongoing, is bitter in this context, but the director can't really do anything about that.)
“The Demon” (Kyle Gellner) is hot on the woman’s trail. But not everything is always as it initially seems.
The script is far from perfect. Especially in the first two chapters, JT Mollner tends to have overly long, chatty dialogues – and when the woman's escape, which is exciting until the end, he doesn't always take the logic very seriously (smoking in the forest hiding place). Apart from these blemishes, with “Strange Darling” he has managed to create a thriller that is as merciless as it is refreshingly brushed against the grain.
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Conclusion: The bloody thriller “Strange Darling” offers a refreshing cat-and-mouse game in beautiful analog images, which is reminiscent of the works of Quentin Tarantino in many ways, even apart from the nested chapter structure. As subversive and surprising as it is fast-paced and exciting!