I'm not fully on board with Strange Darling for very specific, spoiler-filled, reasons.
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Strange Darling feels like the kind of movie a lot 90s movie kids have been waiting for. An indie movie with a ton of visual energy and strong performances that blends genres (in this case erotic thriller and horror) with a fun gimmick (a story told in Six Acts told non-sequentially). So strong reviews and strong word of mouth from movie fans for this energetic little indie. Can it live up to its hype?
The Setup
The movie follows "The Lady," played Willa Fitzgerald, who is being violently pursued by a man known only as "The Demon," in a time and region with a serial killer on the run. But as the story unravels, as does this duo's past and present, it becomes clear that nothing is quite what it seems.
There's a strong tendency with reviewing movies to go with the flow. It's one thing if the reviews for a movie hover around 50% approval and you didn't like it. Pretty clear that a lot of people are in your camp and likely share your reasons. But when you started seeing 90% percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes and you don't like it, it gives you pause (flaws in that system aside).
As you can probably guess from this preface, I'm not fully on board with this movie. But it's also for highly specific, spoilerly reasons so I want address what I like about this movie first. Starting with....
Two Banger Lead Performances
Our leads in this movie are played by Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerlad whom you may know from movies like Smile and Dinner in America and Reacher and The Fall of the House of Usher respectively. Essentially these two are up and coming talents that have demonstrated a penchant for genre films, and this showcase proves exactly why that's a great idea.
The movie needs Gallner to be hard to read. He needs to be a touch charming and a bit sensitive, but also convicingly violent when the script calls for it. Sometimes within a single scene. So which of those guys is real? Hard to say. His shifts in physical intensity are great and help keep the movie as tense as it is.
And then there's Willa Fitzgerald and...holy shit. This has been a banger year for actresses performances in genre fare (i.e. Immaculate and The First Omen come to mind), but Fitzgerald may take the cake. If Gallner is meant to be hard to read, Fitzgerald's "Lady" is wildly unpredictable. And the movie hangs on what she will or won't do next, or how individual moments make her feel. Fitzgerald goes for broke in every moment in this movie, which is not only a great way to buck her more buttoned up previous roles, but also integral to the movie's appeal. Another integral piece? The story structure.
Story Structure
Now I have some issues with this structure, or at least how it's used, but generally speaking I like this idea. Instead of a series of interconnected vignettes like Pulp Fiction, this is all one story split up into six parts. Each of which appear to change the paradigm. So the ideas of who's in charge or character's character can shift every 15-20 minutes and keep the audience engaged and guessing about who we should be rooting for, or theorizing what's going on. It's a novel way to keep the audience's attention, especially because we don't know which segment is going to pop up next.
Visual Flair
So fun fact about this movie...it was shot by Giovanni Ribisi, who also co-produced the film. And I really dig him and writer/director JT Mollner's aestetic. And said aestietic is a combination of 80s and 70s sleaze smoothed out of the modern viewer.
For instance, a number of the early sequences in the film have this high exposure effect where everything looks really really bright with the orange hues in everything turned up to 11. Which looks a like the grainy over-exposed footage you could see in exploitation cinema of this era. But they avoid adding in elements like film grain and instead just let that capture the heightened look and feel of a chase sequence.
It also means when we flip into the past, where Fitzgerald and Gallner are planning their romantic tryst, there's a giant visual contrast in this moody, Michael Mann neon glow that puts you in the headspace of both parties involved at that time. So what's the issue? Well that issue involves heavy spoilers for the entire movie so if you want to know how I feel about it, I think it's promising but unsatisfying and potentially problematic. For why problematic...
Spoiler Alert!!!!
So the movie's hook, in its advertising and beyond is that "nothing is what it seems" in this situation. Which means that as soon as we see "The Lady" running away from "The Demon" the audience is going to assume, this woman is fleeing for her life from some kind of abusive asshole at best. But also that those roles may flip flop based on what we find out next.
And that's more or less what the movie does for the first four segments. We see "The Lady" run from "The Demon," then the "Demon" goes looking for The Lady and comes across an apparent murder victim...that he's not responsible for...then we see Lady and Demon have their tryst and Demon turns violent. And then we see that said violence was all part of an elaborate fantasy that The Lady wanted to play out and that consent and safewords have been involved the whole time. Back and forth with audience expectations and loyalties until the final 2-3 segments where...it's just The Lady being a literal mad woman.
She attacks "The Demon" for no apparent reason. And then kills people trying to call the police. And then tries to hide from "The Demon" before brutally killing him. And then, in a bit that all but confirmed that a man wrote this, The Lady stages the scene to make it look like the man she attacked assaulted him, which convinces a female officer to treat her like a victim, despite the male officers objections and now a serial killer is getting prefential police treatment and it goes about as poorly as you'd expect.
Eventually it is revealed that the Lady is mentally unwell before she's lethally wounded by someone who attempts to help her.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. There's two big reasons this frustrates me. The first is that it breaks its own formula and its appeal. The appeal of this broken structure is that each segment can introduce a new wrinkle or sting to make us curious about the blanks we're still trying to fill in. So when we see that one of the people that took The Lady in is dead, bleeding out on the floor, it's not 100% clear why The Lady would've attacked him. There's an air of mystery to each of these. It means once you don't change the paradigm after the 4th or 5th segment, the audience notices and feels that tension or lack of tension.
Admittedly you could make an argument for this. Why do we want this constant change or can we accept the reality in question, are fun narrative ideas to play with.
The problem is the second aspect which is that the movie seems like it's about women's consent and rape culture and leans on some pretty ugly ideas/beliefs. Again, made in a vaccuum, changing who your villain is from moment to moment and having it be the lady is fine. But there's so much that seems to be intentionally rejecting or refuting rape culture.
The attack/rape fantasy is a great example. In one of the segments The Lady and the Demon are shown engaging in BDSM type kink activities with The Demon strangling the Lady with her handcuffed to the bed. An image and scene that refutes something the audience saw earlier which was The Demon being asked if he was a serial killer and then a hard cut to him strangling the Lady. As it turns out, this was part of their BDSM play. Which then takes a violent turn when The Demon begins belittling The Lady, chains her back up and even slaps her and then...The Lady says a safeword and we cut to them in the car discussing her fantasy and what her limits are. Cut back to The Demon backing off once he hears the word and checking in.
An extreme and textbook example of what consent in kink communities can and should look like. Which means the Lady's turn to literally psycho killer on this guy who then uses her gender to get people to take her seriously or take her in and even fakes sexual assault to get a police woman to view her sympathetically, feels seriously gross. And then you remember how The Lady gave The Demon a giant speech about how much trust a woman gives in a one-night stand in a seedy motel, because the man's worst case is bad sex or sex not happening, but hers is losing her life. Really pointed and honest moment right? Too bad it's coming from a serial killer.
An extreme and textbook example of what consent in kink communities can and should look like. Which means the Lady's turn to literally psycho killer on this guy who then uses her gender to get people to take her seriously or take her in and even fakes sexual assault to get a police woman to view her sympathetically, feels seriously gross. And then you remember how The Lady gave The Demon a giant speech about how much trust a woman gives in a one-night stand in a seedy motel, because the man's worst case is bad sex or sex not happening, but hers is losing her life. Really pointed and honest moment right? Too bad it's coming from a serial killer.
My presumption is the JT Mollner isn't trying to be an asshole. Hell he might even be trying to demonstrate why rape culture puts men at a disadvantage. No one believes The Demon on sight, because he's a regular looking dude carrying a gun, chasing a woman. In a world without all of our problematic gender roles and culture, folks would view both parties either with kindness or suspicious in equal measure. But then you remember that the female cop pickign up the Lady and treating her like a victim is told by her older male boss to treat her like a potential suspect because we don't know what's going on and he's 100% right.
The optics on this suck.
What gets me even more is that the structure is priming the audience to be forced to ask this question...where is the line when it comes to consent? Because despite agreeing to a one night stand. Despite agreeing to rape fantasy. Hell she even acts like an asshole to this guy and tells him "no go" on having sex. Sucks for that guy's experience, but he's not entitled to her body and sex with her. And while I don't want to see an assault scene on screen, I think blurring the lines throughout the movie only to make them crystal clear once The Demon finally violates them would be powerful. The message being that as complicated as it is often portrayed, consent is very very obvious and can be recinded at any moment.
Instead, the expectation that the audience is asked to upend is that this woman, and by extension any woman like her, could be a victim. What you should really consider...is that she might be the bad guy.
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