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A one-night-stand in a motel leads to a prolonged chase between predator and victim culminating with numerous deaths of both the guilty and the innocent in 2023’s Strange Darling.
JT Mollner’s script and film received much praise when it hit theaters in 2023. But before I managed to find a time slot that worked with my schedule it had completed its run and no longer played in any local auditorium forcing me to wait until it appeared on one of my streaming services which it did this month with Shudder.
Miramax
Strange Darling, billed as a thriller in 6 non-sequential acts, is quite competently crafted; it is vibrantly colorful with production designed by Pricilla Elliot that is wonderfully photographed by cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi. The two principal characters remain mostly unnamed in the script, credited only as ‘The Lady’ (Willa Fitzgerald) and ‘The Demon’ (Kyle Gallner). Both performers provide good solid acting as they reveal the nature of their characters. With a brief 97-minute runtime Strange Darling is not a movie that requires a large commitment from its audience and there is more than enough chase, capture, and escape reversals to keep it from becoming overly dull. And yet, with all the praise that this movie earned from the horror film community I cannot endorse it. The more I ponder the movie and its construction the more I find it to be irritating and not entertaining. To discuss why it makes me feel that way requires dancing around the core of the film’s nature that skates right into spoiler territory, so here is your spoiler warning. Proceed no further unless you are prepared to.
ABANDON ALL IGNORANCE YE WHO READ FURTHER
One of the things discussed on the various horror film podcasts I listen to about this movie is that it has a twist. The mere knowledge that a movie has a twist is itself a spoiler, particularly for those of us inclined to work out plots of our own for fun. We will go into the experience looking for the twist, trying to work it out rather than let it reveal itself naturally.
A twist performed properly and fairly can be a great thing to witness; the moment of revelation when everything you have watched before suddenly gets recontextualized and a new paradigm for the story is on display. Strange Darling does not play fair. It cheats its audience to create the moment when everything is supposed to change, presenting moments and sequences entirely out of context, knowing that without the vital context the audience is going to make very erroneous assumptions. This is the reason the six chapters of this thriller are presented in the order of chapters 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, and 6, because to show them in chronological order would render the second half of the film absent of any surprise or unexpected reveal.
Withholding context for a scene is not always a ‘cheat.’ Memento presents each scene in reverse order, depriving the audience of the context for where and how its protagonist came to be in the situation, but because the character is unable to make new memories, he is just as lost as the audience. This puts the audience firmly in the character’s point of view, which is not what is happening with Strange Darling. This movie withholds context in hopes of creating a moment when the floor drops out from under the audience’s feet, but the characters who have lived the story in chronological sequence have no such handicap. This withholding of context is lying to the audience, lying to create in their minds an assumption that is not true so that the ‘truth’ can be revealed.
The movie’s lying begins right at the start with the first title cards that identify one character as ‘The Demon’ and another as ‘The Lady,’ but ‘The Demon’ has a proper name that is used on screen. However, ‘Demon’ creates a deliberate and false impression in the audience, one that powers the story’s supposed twist.
Strange Darling, despite the raves it has gathered from most of the horror community, is a movie that I cannot recommend and one that with each reconsideration becomes more and more one where the time watching becomes time wasted.
