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| Image courtesy of Miramax |
At the tail end of the summer season comes a disturbing, edge of your seat indie flick that treads in the boundaries between independent arthouse thriller and blood curdling terror.
Director JT Mollner's Strange Darling is an uber violent analog specimen that never lets up. Shot entirely on 35mm by none other than Giovanni Ribisi, the film is a deviation from this year's other horror offerings, bringing us back to the elements that truly make the genre so diverse and dynamic. Strange Darling runs its audience through the wringer then back again. From the dark and perverse to straight up violent and mind numbing, this lower budget feature has all the markings of a great director in his early phase. We're watching his talent unfurl before the world. As his first ever full-length cinematic release, this harkens back to the first works of Jeremy Saulnier, bringing hyper realism to the screen via characters that are morally bankrupt and thrown into desperate situations due to their own awful choices and flaws.
The film opens with a text crawl, narrated by Jason Patric, that calls back to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We're given very little back story. All we're told is that a serial killer is loose, claiming numerous victims. A tour of terror has blanketed Colorado to Oregon from 2018-2010. We're instantly thrown into the mix where no history or back story is covered. We just know that the ride is about to start as we're introduced to the main players. There's an instant tension between the two main leads played by Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner. Giving away anything else might spoil this insane ride, so we'll digress.
Strange Darling is a beast of a film. It's unrelenting. And boundless. There are no guard rails. It turns today's modern fear of sex in cinema on its head, digging into fetishistic behaviors and kinks as Mollner also takes a cold hard look at drug use, physical abuse and the grim nature of humans as a whole. This is a chase film. This is a slasher film. This is a film with no safety net whatsoever. And it's so refreshing to experience while seated in a darkened theater instead of streaming on some random service. His work deserves the proper treatment.
The entirety of Strange Darling belongs to Willa Fitzgerald. Her portrayal is on point, constantly walking a line between damaged goods, confident and absolutely unhinged. While Gallner also delivers an amazing lead performance, the entire run time belongs to her character and performance. It would be a hard press to pick a better female lead this year.
Being shot on actual film adds that particular feel to Strange Darling. It's a movie being presented the way it would have been decades ago, in all its grainy glory with actual lighting and zero digital effects work. It just two people at odds while the ramifications of their actions play out on the world around them no matter the cost. It will be interesting to see how the positive reaction will ultimately effect this one going forward. With movies like Long Legs garnering so much attention this summer, it's shocking to see that this isn't getting much notoriety.
-CG