“Strange Darling” (2024) is allegedly a dramatization of a “true” story about the most prolific and unique serial killer of the twenty first century. It follows The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), not to be confused with The Lady from “Lady and the Tramp” (1955), and The Demon (Kyle Gallner) chasing her. She briefly finds refuge at a couple’s beautiful home blaring the radio on bullhorns surrounding the property. At night, the Lady and the Demon are on a date, but by the time that the sun rises, a life and death struggle ensues over who will survive. Will she get away?
If you ever watch a movie, and the characters do not have names, it is often a good idea just to cut your losses and stop watching since the writer could not be bothered and clearly suffers from grandiose delusions that their work has broader significance to all of humanity. The Lady seems in charge as she lays down the ground rules for the date. With the promise of getting lucky, The Demon seems chill until he is not. The ridicule over nineties era college campus rules about sexual consent or the men who got outraged at the Tik Tok trend of women claiming that they would choose the bear over men seems to inspire their interactions. Only in that way does this film prophetically decry gender roles and skewer the perception of threat versus the reality of violence. “Strange Darling” is a highly constructed way to get the high ground in those forums without grounding its premise in reality or even in an innovative way. There are a ton of movies which have already taken this kind of material and played with the concept absent all the self-congratulatory hype. Don’t pull anything while patting yourself on the back.
Director and writer JT Mollner’s sophomore feature film is being praised for an amazing plot twist that you will not see coming…or will see coming within the first five minutes if you have seen more than a few movies or watched the news ever in your life. Mollner basically opens the credits by announcing the two main actors’ character designations then claims that the twist is believing his terms for them. He over relies on assumptions based on gender and seems to constantly wag his finger at characters and moviegoers naïve enough to believe the surface of what he has shown them as if they are guilty of reverse discrimination. Meanwhile Mollner forgets that gender discrimination is believing that one gender is not a full human by keeping them two-dimensional, good or bad, thus incapable of a spectrum of behavior with plenty of real-life examples far more interesting than what he depicts in “Strange Darling.” The real darling is Mollner for not having enough knowledge about actual serial killers. Bless his heart.
The story is told in six chapters and an epilogue that are arranged out of order. The bookends are in black and white like a documentary, which coupled with the introductory scroll claiming that it is a true story, will lull less experienced moviegoers into trusting Mollner since it bears the visual veneer of truth. More experienced viewers will just fold their arms and immediately start questioning the veracity of “Strange Darling.” The rest of the film is shot in color.
If the narrative order sounds confusing, it is not. When Christopher Nolan does good work, he is the best. This narrative structure is not even as challenging as “Memento” (2020), which at least told the story in reverse and was a surprise. Without the chapter division, the film alternates between the nighttime and daytime story until it converges and repeats scenes that Mollner already showed earlier. While it may not be a new and exciting technique, and starting a film in media res is a tired trope, the structure actually is one of the few aspects of the story that keeps it easier to stay invested until the end because it is at least theoretically interesting to find out how everyone fares with all the switchblades, shotguns, pistols and bear spray (oh my) being brandished.
Red dominates the landscape and signifies blood and danger…groundbreaking! Even seedy environments like a motel seem glossy and slick instead of dingy and sordid. Actor Giovanni Ribisi may be the real star of the film since it is his first time behind the scenes functioning as a cinematographer. Too bad his talents are wasted on a boring film. Without his work, creating a gorgeous and visually sumptuous film, “Strange Darling” would have floundered at the box office.
The ensemble cast does a great job and were committed to the puddle deep material. Fitzgerald is captivating and never breaks character. Gallner seemed to have a harder time acting as if two things could be simultaneously true about his character, which is necessary when there is a twist, especially considering that some people really love “Strange Darling” and will probably rewatch the flick if they did not see the twist coming. To be fair, Gallner has the heavier lift. Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr. play Genevieve and Frederick respectively, the owners of the beautiful home, which is like a Garden of Eden. Though their appearance is brief, they make a meal out of a morsel. They nail their roles by making them seem nice, not as if they were going to bust out with a banjo and add to the list of problems that the characters are having. In their brief scenes, they seem clearly smitten and unconcerned as they consume food that looks like a heart attack on a plate. The real fiction is the fact that they remain slim eating that many calories.
Mollner deserves kudos for giving us a relatively fresh breath of air with the introduction of these two odd lovebirds as foils to the main couple. Their entire way of life seems to be a nostalgic appreciation for the good old days when couples could live in harmony and silence without any conflict. They are a little progressive—Frederick does the cooking. If “Strange Darling” has a lesson, it is to stop worrying and enjoy the heterosexual, conventional love instead of questioning it otherwise everyone is miserable.
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The twist is that The Lady is a serial killer, and she plays the victim whenever she is close to being caught whereas many men are too savvy to fall for the okie doke, which absolves them from calling women cunt and bitch, which in the year of 2024, was probably already ok to say since cunt has become a compliment in the US. “Strange Darling” felt like an elaborate excuse to dunk on women and have cover to ridicule women’s wariness of men and [lip service of] believe women when they talk about their horrible experiences. A lot of women do not believe women when there is proof of wrongdoing. Please read Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.” Meanwhile men are innocent victims who know better. Mollner’s understanding of rhetoric versus the actual landscape of gender politics has such a big gap that the Grand Canyon looks at the chasm when it goes on vacation.
Mollner, I’m going to hold your hand as I write this: there are women serial killers, and Tik Tok had a whole challenge where women actors faked crying then turned it off instantly. Not everyone believes that women are incapable of an orgy of violence, and The Lady is tame. Have you heard of slavery? Women were slaveholders and responsible for the sadistic torture and deaths of many people. When I say slaveholder, you say serial killer. Slave holder! Serial killer! Slave holder! Serial killer! It is a trait of supremacist culture to be shocked that a certain demographic of women is capable of evil. Also, there is this little art house movie, “Zone of Interest” (2023), which shows the chilling callousness of seemingly ordinary women. So Mollner does deserve praise for making Tanya (Bianca A. Santos), who appears to be a woman of color, be the only character who does not fall for The Lady’s schtick, but this twist is one of his own creation. There are plenty of movies that have covered this ground in cleverer ways such as “Audition” (1999), “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane” (2013), “Siren” (2018), “X” (2022), “Pearl” (2022), “Titane” (2021). I wish that my brain had a search function because I am sure that there are more. This film just felt so familiar, which made it dull as dishwater for me to watch.
It is possible to make a movie that subverts women’s concerns and gives a filmmaker free reign to use all sorts of horrible epithets against a woman, but if it is the sole point without making the characters anything other than archetypes, then why bother? “Strange Darling” has a dumb, predictable twist, and if you are surprised, I’m happy for you because someone should enjoy it; however, if you hated “Blink Twice” (2024), are you sure that you just don’t suffer from misogyny, internalized or otherwise? If you care more about proving that women are bad and mercurial than creating an interesting woman villain, then your priorities are messed up, which also may explain why the violence was tame for a serial killer movie. Mollner obscures The Demon’s torture because even a movie that claims to be daring, it is not brave enough to empathize with its male victim’s pain during torture.
Even if you enjoyed “Strange Darling” for the right reasons, and assuming that the Lady sees the main male character as a demon, there is nothing more disappointing than to call someone a demon and not having even a slight, brief visual representation from her point of view. We have “Longlegs” (2024) pulling Satan out of thin air, but I can’t get one hallucination. Even one of the previews seemed to have a flash of some weird image, but it does not appear in the film.
Also I’m going to take both of Mollner’s hands as I write the following: in what world do you live in that the isolated, doomsday preppers who believe in cryptids and listen to AM radio at full blast are the nicest people. I liked the couple, and for me, that was the real twist. I want a movie about those two because they are rare. Usually those types are the villains or the foreboding obstacle.
