NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Strange Darling is the sort of movie that people will recommend to you with the added caveat that you should know as little as possible about it before you go. It’s a ruthless, nasty, blood-soaked mix of arthouse and grindhouse, a low-budget production made with more skill and energy than you see in most mainstream films these days. It announces how stylish it’s going to be before it even starts: extreme slo-mo, black-and-white interludes, a title card proudly proclaiming it was shot on 35mm film.
It also tells us on the title screen that it’s “a thriller in 6 chapters,” and those chapters are deliberately scrambled to obfuscate key details about the characters: It starts at chapter 3, jumps ahead to chapter 5 and then back to chapter 1, all in the first 20 minutes.
There’s an ominous text crawl, reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that tells us what we’re about to see is a dramatization of the final crimes committed by a prolific American serial killer. Then we see a woman, battered and bloody and wearing nurse’s scrubs, running out of the woods and directly toward the camera. On her tail is a man with a shotgun.
Neither of these characters have names, but they’re referred to in the credits as the Lady and the Demon. She’s played by Willa Fitzgerald and he’s played by Kyle Gallner, and they’re two incredibly deft performances in ways I can’t explain because it would reveal too much.
From that evocative opening stretch, director JT Mollner’s script shows us, in fragments and detours, how these people came to meet. She has handcuffs in her purse. He has that shotgun underneath the back seat of his truck. There are a couple of long conversations in a seedy hotel room, an attempt at S&M role playing, a bunch of recreational drugs, and an unexpected interlude involving Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey as an old hippie couple living in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
Strange Darling is filled with twists and big reveals, and one of them is that the confident, imaginative cinematography is courtesy of character actor Giovanni Ribisi. This is his first feature behind the camera, but he has clearly paid attention when he was on sets, and he pulls off a number of complicated tracking and crane shots that elevate the lurid thriller plot.
As for that plot, it cleverly plays with our expectations about how these kinds of movies typically play out, not only in its edgy exploration of gender roles but in its subversion of the traditional whodunit formula. Watching it sometimes feels like you’re on the receiving end of a three-card monte game, and your brain will either be working overtime to get ahead of the story or it'll just go along for the ride. It's a trick that probably only works once when you're truly in the dark, but it's a nifty trick nonetheless.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101 heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.