STRANGE DARLING - Mark Reviews Movies

Strange Darling, Magenta Light Studios

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

Strange Darling opens with a woman, looking to be in distress and her face bloodied, running. Some opening text (accompanied by grim, matter-of-fact narration from Jason Patric) informs us that, between 2018 and 2020, a serial killer terrorized the Midwest, before moving farther west to evade capture, culminating in a final series of murders that are being dramatized in this film. That seems to answer the question of the running woman, at least.

Sure enough, writer/director JT Mollner's story proceeds with a sequence of the woman, named in the credits as "the Lady" and played by Willa Fitzgerald, in the middle of a car chase. Her pursuer is a man referred to as "the Demon" in the credits and played by Kyle Gallner, and that answers more about the circumstances in which the Lady finds herself. This man is determined to get her, speeding down a country road and only stopping to pull out his rifle, take aim, and fire a shot that goes right through the rear window of the car being driven by the woman.

For a tale that seems so straightforward, it's difficult to determine how much to reveal about it or even when these specific events take place in the timeline of Mollner's narrative. For us, these scenes occur right at the start, and they inform everything about the plot and, more importantly, our understanding of these characters.

What, though, are we to make of the fact that the film itself tells us that this isn't actually the start of the story? Along with the title, the opening credits also tell the audience that this is a story told in six chapters, only to announce that the car chase and the subsequent game of cat-and-mouse in the woods aren't even the first chapter of the tale.

This, obviously, is a gimmick, and initially, it feels like a cheap one on Mollner's part. What about this simple story of a man chasing and clearly trying to kill a woman, fully informed by the only bit of exposition regarding a serial killer on the loose, demands such a roundabout and opaque structure of storytelling?

Mollner's playing a game with us, and as odd and confounding as the structuring of this screenplay may initially seem, it pays off in surprising, satisfying, and increasingly uncomfortable ways. That's what we fundamentally want from a thriller, so this film succeeds simply in giving us exactly what we want.

The key to the material's success, though, turns out to be its structure, which jumps back and forth in time, between chapters in such a way that order emerges from the chaos of events and the apparent randomness of its sequencing, and somehow manages to turn something that first operates on a predictable level into one that's routinely unexpected. Even when we think we have a handle on the real story being told here, Mollner provides revelations that alter our perception of what's happening and small details that pay off after we've forgotten about them being established.

Is that type of approach still fundamentally cheap? It is, yes, but the better question is whether that description is inherently a negative one. It might be in another kind of movie or a hypothetical version of this one that takes itself seriously, but Mollner is working in that tried-and-true tradition of the potboiler thriller. Part of the fun is not knowing what could possibly come next, while the rest of it is the shock of discovering what wicked twist the storyteller has to throw at us next.

Yes, it's cheap in terms of content, theme, and execution. Mollner embraces that fully and delivers a decidedly sleazy, violent, and occasionally startling piece of cheap entertainment—admirably, without any apologies for doing so.

The good thing about discussing what the film does, what it's trying to do, and how it accomplishes those things is that there's little time for much a description of the plot, the ignorance of which is the best way to enter the story. What could be said of it, anyway, since it is so basic and a chronological synopsis would give away too much? It can be revealed that the Lady's escape from the Demon leads her to a remote house, where an older married couple (played by Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.) give her shelter.

That doesn't last long, apparently, because the Lady is hiding somewhere in the next chapter we see—not, again, the chapter that should follow on the narrative's actual timeline. We don't know where she is, though, and neither does the Demon, leading to some hide-and-seek that still doesn't answer why we can only account for one half of the couple who let the woman in their house.

The denial of key pieces of information on Mollner's part is as crucial as the revelations of them, in other words. That's vital to when the story does finally get around to showing how the Lady and the Demon end up in this chase. That's during a scene that toys with our perspective and expectations several times over, while also giving us a small sense of how dexterous and nuanced Fitzgerald's performance becomes over the course of the film. To speak of it specifically, of course, would give away something or other, but her work possesses the instinctual quality of a reflex, as the Lady operates on survival mechanisms that, later, she admits not even to fully comprehend.

That's probably enough, before the vagueness becomes incomprehensible or the temptation to say more becomes too irresistible. Strange Darling deserves the mystery it demands, because the film's puzzle of adroit plotting, expectation-shattering, and the darkness of human nature is such warped fun to see pieced together.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products