STRANGE DARLING Is Clever…But Not That Clever

The twist is all there is.

JT Mollner’s Strange Darling uses audience genre knowledge of slashers and some storytelling techniques borrowed from Tarantino to turn a fairly standard genre exercise into a less predictable suspense offering. That’s very clever…but despite an impressively virtuosic performance by Willa Fitzgerald, it never quite manages to be that clever. Like Abigail (which also has a Tarantino influence), once the movie has confounded your expectations, it doesn’t have much to say beyond “look I confounded your expectations!” Which is likely to leave one a little disappointed especially if, like me, you figure out the big twist before the opening backstory text screen has finished scrolling.

Since there’s really not much to this movie except that big twist, I’m going to spoil it in the review below. If that puts you off, stop reading now!

Okay; spoilers ho.

Strange Darling is organized in six chapters, which are shown out of order because showing them in order would let the serial killer out of the bag too quickly. But, if you run it in order, the plot is fairly straightforward. The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) picks up a nameless guy (Kyle Gallner) for a night of anonymous BDSM kink and sex. After some prelude, she drugs him and carves her name into his chest; she’s a serial killer named the Electric Lady. Nameless guy, aka the Demon, is a cop though, and has a concealed gun; he manages to shoot her ear and arm.

She runs; he pursues. Most of the rest of the film is her asking people for help and then murdering them because they assume (like you do!) that she’s a helpless victim in a slasher, rather than the slasher in the slasher.

Again, Fitzgerald is wonderful in a fun role that allows her to act a woman who is pretending to be the clichéd slasher horny bad girl/victim/final girl and then defy your expectations. More, her alternation between victim/killer functions as a neat little commentary on the dynamics of the typical slasher, in which the final girl is stalked through the film until she reverses roles at the very end, turns on Freddy/Jason/Michael/whoever, and becomes the ruthless bloody revenge killer herself.

In that sense, Strange Darling really isn’t changing the slasher so much as switching the sequence slightly, so that the final girl takes on the role of killer earlier in the arc, and the Demon takes it on later. The S&M roleplay could be seen as a kind of mirroring of slasher dynamics—the film presents a drama of sexualized/gendered violence which is exciting/fulfilling in part because the woman/bottom is in control—and gets to be a switch by the end (or the middle in this case.)

As I’ve said, this is a smart commentary on the genre, and you could see it following further in the footsteps of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and thinking about viewer’s investments in violence, in pulp tropes, and in what is opened, or closed, when those investments are challenged or rearranged. And/or, it could dive deeper into the implications of the alternation of top/bottom and gender positioning, a la a bizarre romp like Freaky.

Strange Darling never quite gets there though. Part of the problem is that we learn remarkably little about the two main characters. We know the Demon is a cop, but nothing else about him. For her part, the Electric Lady’s motivations are almost completely opaque. The film half suggests a twisted feminist revenge motivation for her early on, but then at the end settles on the idea that she’s mentally ill and murders because she sees hallucinations. That’s not really consistent with the rest of what we see of her, and also leaves the film without much to say other than, “crazy people are crazy.” Which feels like a cop out, and not just because of the ableism. (And not just because of the anticlimactic “order is restored” ending either.)

Strange Darling isn’t a bad movie. It features some excellent performances and delivers the expected genre pleasures in a novel and unexpected way. If you like slashers, or twisty suspense, it’s worth seeing. Just be aware that the “strange” in the title is not something the movie actually delivers.