Review: Sweet Sticky 'Strange Darling' Is Rom-Com For Psychopaths

By Jason Adams | Film | August 27, 2024 |

It starts as many a movie has before—with a young blonde woman covered in her own blood running in absolute terror across a forest. But where Strange Darling, writer-director JT Mollner’s twisty high-wire act of a thriller goes from there cuts not so generic a path through its woods —just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, this movie shuffles and reshuffles its deck, catapulting us into an entirely different story than the one we thought we were watching just a split-second sooner. It’s a wild feat of screenwriting, performance, and filmmaking wizardry (marking Giovanni Ribisi’s first turn, and a stellar one at that, as cineamatographer) that won’t soon be forgotten. Strange Darling carves its initials right on your heart.

It’s also an incredibly difficult movie to write about because spoiling its surprises feels akin to throwing the wedding cake in the trash while the betrothed are slipping on their rings in just the other room. So pardon me up-front if I’m a little cagey with some details—I just want everybody to have the best of times. And Strange Darling is very much the best of times.

After a Texas-Chain-Saw-Massacre-esque news scroll informs us of a serial killer on the loose, Strange Darling kicks things off in the middle just like the Star Wars saga before it. Its opening title cards tell us right off that 1) this movie is “A Thriller in Six Chapters” and 2) that we’re currently in Chapter 3. The card deck I mentioned up top has apparently been dropped on the floor and quickly picked back up and re-shuffled back together, but no worries—there will be methods to Mollner’s madness, you will learn, as he doles out what we need to know about this story as the story demands it and not a moment sooner. And while in some hands such modes of disorganization can get gimmicky, Mollner makes it thrilling. This movie is so, so much fun to experience. (And, I should add from my own experience, then watch a second time and see how it’s a totally different movie.)

So back to that young blonde woman covered in her own blood, running in terror through the forest. We’re also told by the helpful opening credits that she will be known to us as “The Lady.” And The Lady is played by Willa Fitzgerald (formerly of the Scream TV series) in what should prove to be a barn-stormer of a star-making performance—Fitzgerald grips this movie between her teeth and shakes it around like a play-toy, and it’s a transfixing marvel of slippery screen acting. It’s a fine example of how and why actors will make their names time and time again in horror movies—nowhere else do you get to swing to these extremes from scene to scene. And Fitzgerald proves to be an acrobat of extreme dexterity, sticking the landing and then some. Just wow, y’all.

And she’s met her match—and also then some, and then some more—with her onscreen counterpart, the man who it turns out is chasing her through that forest rifle in hand, the one bloodying her up in the first place. And as those extremely helpful title cards once again tell us, he’s known only as “The Demon.” And The Demon is played by one-time Veronica Mars actor and current reigning Scream King Kyle Gallner, who’s been seen over the past few years in everything from the 2022 Scream reboot to Smile to my personal favorite last year’s under-the-radar gem The Passenger from The Ruins director Carter Smith. (Definitely seek that one out!)

Gallner has been noodling about in horror for decades now (hell he was in the failed Nightmare on Elm Street reboot a million years ago) but Strange Darling too for him marks what should be a watershed moment. The film isn’t entirely a two-hander—we’ll get to some of the unforgettable side characters the film also has in store for us in a minute—but it basically is. Some delectable side-dishes but The Lady and The Demon are our main course. And these two actors feed us a feast.

In a rock-em-sock-em road-chase that feels teleported right out of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof—and Tarantino is probably the biggest influence on Strange Darling, with its swiped from Pulp Fiction asymmetrical structure—we watch our Demon chase our Lady down, shooting out the back window of her red Pinto and spinning it into a tumble off the road. (And a sidenote: a Pinto will never stop being a world-class gag in and of itself.) And so the forest chase is on. Lady proves a wily one—she tends her wounds with dogged and fierce determination, and then stumbles upon a well-tended cabin buried in the woods. And as we all know, nothing bad has ever happened at a cabin in the woods. Smash cut to…

… another chapter. Strange Darling will do this to us several times (enough to fill six chapters and an epilogue anyway) as the pulling of its rugs proves its bread and butter. I won’t detail every single one—please just watch the excellent movie for that!—but this one’s important because we find ourselves teleported back to our story’s true beginning, in Chapter 1. And it turns out our Lady and her Demon were engaged in something far less terrifying—just some simple eye-fucking one other from opposite sides of a pick-up truck on what turns out to be their first date. Or more precisely they’re approaching the cross-roads of their first date, since they are now sitting in said truck outside a motel, discussing whether they should head inside said motel to do as adults sometimes do and get down to sexy business. (Her first question: “Are you a serial killer?”)

As a juxtaposition to the frenetic action we’ve just witnessed, this scene slams the brakes, slowing the movie down to a sudden conversational crawl. (And if I have one complaint about the movie I have to say that the sound mix is a little off, so that some of its whispering becomes unintelligible at times.) But it’s a flourish that also feels right out of Tarantino—long scenes of dialogue dropped in between big bursts of violence—but if you’re gonna swipe from a master, QT’s a good one to go with. (Just ask the entire second half of the 1990s.) Especially if you can, as Mollner can, write actual interesting dialogue for the characters to rat-a-tat back and forth.

Fitzegarld and Gallner deliver on that beautifully. And the tension inherent in their repartee, with what we know will come of it only too soon, is handled deftly by the both of them—because after all what is a first date but the trying on of roles to see which part of the puzzle you are slides best into the other person’s puzzle-self? These two don’t know each other yet, but they want to, intimately. And their wrangling for who’ll be on top will (in many ways, from many angles) make the entire picture.

So it surely helps that these actors have chemistry for miles—these scenes, and the ones that follow soon after inside the hotel room, practically throb with a sweaty sexual tension. The dangerous kind, yes obviously. And this movie gets its jollies off by jolting itself hard against questionable flirting-with-danger behavior. Girls and boys behaving badly and then getting bashed in the face with comeuppance for it. And then the whole hourglass is tipped over and we’re into the quicksand once again. Just trying to keep your head up as Strange Darling sinks deeper into its moral morass will keep you so busy that you won’t even see Mollner & Co’s sleights of hand happening, setting up its next trick and the trick beyond that.

One of the tools used to distract us from our two-some’s bloody battle of the sexes is that we will at several points in the proceedings meet and spend some moments with other characters of note. There are a few magical little cameo roles—and this is a movie where every character, big or small, somehow feels memorable. But none will be more “of note” than the so-called “Mountain People” named Genevieve (Barbara Hershey) and Frederick (Ed Begley Jr), whose truly deranged Sunday breakfast (words would never do it justice) finds itself suddenly interrupted by our bloodied Lady banging on their door and begging for help. But please do pay attention to the shifting ways that the couple describe themselves to Lady as this scene progresses, because there be lessons in it. Like a miniature of the entire shebang, how Genevieve and Frederick explain themselves shifts with the wind, uncovering several versions of who they are depending on who’s talking and what they’re responding to. And I think that’s where Strange Darling’s heart beats loudest. (At least until it bleeds out anyway.)

An excavation of the unknowability of self wrapped in a relationship drama wrapped in the skins of a slasher movie’s worth of corpses, this movie is a shotgun blast to the face of whispered sweet nothings. It’s pillow talk for pillows that are positively squishy with gore. We are all inconceivable riddles, maybe most of all to ourselves. And Strange Darling is giddy with the mess and spectacle we make of heart-to-hearts vis-à-vis the mortification of our endless, tireless bullshit. It’s the truest romance indeed—a lie here, a lie there, and we find ourselves suddenly reinvented in our lover’s image. Even if we have to shove ourselves through a meat grinder to get to that happy place.