‘Strange Darling’ Review: A Squirm-Inducing Battle of Wills That Keeps You Guessing

JT Mollner’s Strange Darling opens with a metatextual flourish that would make Quentin Tarantino proud. The opening crawl sets the scene using the bright-red lettering and creepy, monotone narration of an old-school video nasty. It lets us know that we’re about to witness the last known movements of a prolific American serial killer. Then a title card appears, informing us that Strange Darling will be “a thriller in six chapters,” and we’re thrown into the middle of a furious car chase between a shotgun-toting man (Kyle Gallner) driving a pickup truck and a bloodied young woman (Willa Fitzgerald) in a bright red Ford Pinto. And then another title card arrives, revealing that this sequence is actually the third of those six chapters.

This sort of winking, self-aware opening feels like Strange Darling calling its shot. It’s letting us know, right away, that it thinks it’s pretty sly. And the good news is that it can back up this bravado, because the film that follows is a cunningly devised thriller that wields our assumptions against us like a sharp implement, delighting in making us squirm.

The rest of Strange Darling’s chapters are doled out in a jumbled order that slowly allows us to piece together the story of how these two unnamed characters came to be engaged in that hot pursuit. Except that each new piece of the puzzle we receive radically alters our impression of what the final picture is going to be. Which is impressive, given that the film’s opening seems so black-and-white, as you’d think that there wouldn’t be any information you could subsequently receive that would meaningly re-contextualize the sight of an armed man maniacally chasing after a terrified woman while cramming narcotics up his nose. And yet.

Surprise is absolutely vital to the experience of watching this provocative, perspective-shifting film, so it’s important not to spoil any of the specific details that the other chapters reveal. It’s enough to say that, in one moment, Strange Darling looks like an old-school rape-revenge movie and, in another, a purposeful subversion of that sub-genre. In one chapter we’re sure we know who the bad guy is only for the next one to leave us a whole lot less certain.

In terms of its sexual politics, there’s no doubt that Mollner’s film is flirting with some very loaded subtext, and there are moments when it seems like it might land somewhere seriously regressive. For a certain period of the film, it seems like Strange Darling might reveal itself to be one long, ugly rejection of the “believe women” mantra. But these flirtations are just that—carefully calculated moments designed to tease at our expectations and toy with our fears.

Gallner and Fitzgerald, both intensely charismatic, are a huge asset to the script’s game of bait and switch, making it feel like the film matters beyond pastiche. They’re alone together on screen for much of Strange Darling and enjoy a fluid sort of chemistry that makes them immediately believable as mortal enemies, fuck buddies, and seemingly everything in between. In some ways, they’re effectively doing the work of four actors. And the harder it is for us to pin down the actual relationship between their characters, the more eager we are to understand it.

Just as Strange Darling gets an incredible amount out of its central pair, cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi—yes, that Giovanni Ribisi—often manages to conjure a huge amount from limited resources. One chapter features an extended conversation inside a car that might have been visually uninspiring, were it not bathed in the otherworldly blue glow of the buzzing neon sign that the vehicle is parked in front of. The film’s dark interiors all brim with seedy possibilities, while the countryside that the pair chase each other through has the unsettling openness and too-bright quality of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film.

You can also find the DNA of more modern horror movies in Strange Darling. Its soundtrack, like that of many a horror film from A24, is a beguiling blend of brain-melting noise blasts and ethereal indiepop. But the film that its chopped-up narrative most calls to mind is Memento. Both films effectively rely on an extended Kuleshov effect, where our understanding of what we’ve just seen is continually blown apart and reformed. It seems like a film that might suffer on re-watch, where it has to operate without the element of surprise and the true nature of every scene is clear from the outset. But those who come to Strange Darling unsure of where it’s going to take them are sure to have one hell of a time finding out.