Strange Darling (Frightfest 2024) Review

As the sappy Everly Brothers classic that scores this film’s opening goes, love hurts, and right off the bat it should be prefaced that Strange Darling is a film you should go into completely blind. It’s the sort of energetic, attention-dominating indie thriller that boasts a major twist every other scene, and keeps the intensity to the max over its brisk, ninety minute runtime. To be as cryptic as I can, the opening credits introduce the two leads, Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, as The Lady and The Demon, and we start this thriller told in six chapters, helpfully, at chapter three. The Demon is chasing the blood-soaked Lady by car, firing at her, and viciously trying to run her over before she’s chased on foot into the woods. It’s a hell of an opening dripped in slasher conventions, but then we suddenly jump back in time to see our two adversaries in his truck together, playfully sharing whiskey amidst some intense flirting as they prepare to have a one night stand at a motel.

That’s just the first ten minutes, but they accurately set the tone for how unpredictable this film is as it changes gears and swaps genres at every turn. Writer and director JT Mollner makes a hugely confident splash, steering Strange Darling through all of its ugly scenes of violence and comically dour observations of common life (there’s a sequence of a couple making breakfast that’s arguably the most offensive scene in the film). Visually it’s fantastically expressive, filled with showy oners, dynamic crane shots, and nimble insert shots that slyly amp up the tension. What’s more the 35mm photography really pops with vibrant colour, from neon lit interiors to sun-baked vistas, the images are given a wild, sickly-sweet look, which is a hugely impressive effort from first time cinematographer … [checks notes] … Giovanni Ribisi? Sure, I’ll take it.

The screenplay is impressively fine-tuned in how and when information is revealed, the flashy-yet-fractured narrative being one of the many connections this film has with the works of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. I know, few films have spawned a more consistently terrible, over-confident litter of awful knock-offs than Pulp Fiction, but despite this Strange Darling stands out as a separate beast. The vintage stylings, hyperactive teenage-brained logic, and the sense of self-mythologising in its cast of kooky side-characters, all have the hallmarks of films akin to Killing Zoe and Death Proof. While its brand of humour and more zany departures from reality don’t always click, it’s an admirable by-product of Mollner and co.’s ambitions to swing wide and just about hit it.

While the horror and thriller elements of this film are brash and engrossing, there’s another side to it that explores the kinky psycho-sexual relationship between the two leads, and reveals bit by bit how this one night stand went so wrong. It’s this context that takes the film in a whole new direction, complicating the violence and actions of the latter half of the story, and bringing to mind The Piano Teacher, the works of Ryū Murakami, writer of the novels that provided the basis of Audition and Nicholas Pesce’s 2018 film Piercing – which is particularly relevant to Strange Darling. Kyle Gallner, who’s slowly but surely shaping up to be one of the most interesting cult actors of our time, gives another impressively varied, physically bold performance. Why Hollywood has yet to pick him as a leading man is beyond me, but his dedication to small, grassroots American indie cinema has carved him a wonderfully eclectic body of work that has the hallmarks of a big, up-and-coming character actor. Yet it’s Willa Fitzgerald who owns the film, with a wildly ranged performance that goes from full on “final girl” terror to powerfully confident sex symbol. She’s electric, and gives a performance so bravely committed that watching her feels like an event in and of itself. Her and Gallner’s ability to switch on a dime between the many phases their characters endure is shockingly convincing, and any moment that these two share on screen is enthralling to watch.

To me, Strange Darling is simply a grim, perverse relationship story with some dicey sexual and gender politics to match – something that could ruffle some feathers, but that’s the sort of edgy mode Mollner operates in. He envelopes us in this gleefully abject, unrealistically sour perception of the world, and gives us little to chew on thematically, but makes up for it in delivering an intoxicated genre exercise – one that succeeds on the solid grounds of its meticulous construction and the breakneck propulsion of plot and action. It’s scrappy, with plenty of wear and tear around the edges, but nonetheless this has the legs to become one of the most talked about genre films of the second half of 2024, and if there was any justice in the world it would boast star-making turns for Fitzgerald and Gallner.

Jake’s Archive – Strange Darling