In director J.T. Mollner's horror thriller Strange Darling, starring Willa Fitzgerald, a relentless predator tracks an injured woman through the Oregon wilderness.Allyson Riggs/VVS
Strange Darling
Written and directed by J.T. Mollner
Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner and Barbara Hershey
Classification 14A; 96 minutes
Opens in select theatres Aug. 23
The words written in bright red lettering greet audiences of J.T. Mollner’s Strange Darling: “Shot entirely on 35 mm film.” It’s a statement that positions the movie as the latest entry in a recent slew of genre flicks that aspire to land somewhere between arthouse and grindhouse. In Strange Darling, it’s filmmaking that is preoccupied with the performance of auteurist grandeur rather than the basics of good scriptwriting.
Strange Darling follows the self-congratulatory declaration of its celluloid status with a visually symmetrical, slow-motion scene of star Willa Fitzgerald – bloodied and clearly in distress – running away from some unseen threat while the film’s soundtrack plays a maudlin rendition of the Everly Brothers’ heartbreak ballad Love Hurts. It’s the kind of sardonic and deeply on-the-nose trope we’ve seen play out what feels like endless times before in the genre filmmaking of the past several years.
If that weren’t enough to make audiences realize exactly the type of movie they just sat down to watch, they are then confronted with the film’s title card: Strange Darling: A Thriller in Six Chapters. With this sequence of self-satisfied frames, so begins Mollner’s colour-saturated and deeply unsubtle world.
Guiding us through the story in non-chronological order, Strange Darling introduces us to its main character, a young woman referred to as The Lady, with a series of indelicate unveilings. When her story begins, we meet her and a man christened by the film as The Demon (Kyle Gallner) as they drink and smoke in his car under the dim neon lights of a cheap hotel. The pair are engaged in a choreography of language and power, both assumed and real, as they circle their intentions to spend the night together. The Lady clearly and confidently shares her sexual desires, while The Demon is eager yet unsure. It’s a doubly staged act of gendered possibilities as the camera’s gaze roves across the several weapons in The Demon’s nearby reach.
Strange Darling shapes much of its narrative by staging these kinds of assumptions, all winkingly fed to us by Mollner’s script and camera work: this woman’s power is fleeting, she will inevitably come to be victimized by this man in some way, someone will come to her aid, and so on. The problem is, once you figure out the writer-director’s angle on the confluence of gender and genre expectations, he doesn’t offer up much else.
Not all films starring women require a female director or writer at the helm, but Mollner’s clunky, eye-roll inducing dialogue in Strange Darling will make you wish there was one here. Characters utter lines that are darkly cryptic enough to maintain the film’s attempted arty veneer, but convey the same predictable and underwritten themes ad nauseum.
Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within. There is a way to twist and maybe even delightfully squirm at a story’s overturning of gendered assumptions, and how a female villain like The Lady might exploit these expectations to her benefit, but Mollner’s execution is deeply flawed, resulting in what feels like an exercise in working out male anxieties in a post-#MeToo landscape.
It may not have been the director’s intent to bait his audience with such a bad faith rendering of his main character, but it is certainly the impact, and not even beloved character actor Giovanni Ribisi’s novel cinematography (yes, you read right) can redeem Strange Darling’s deeply seeded “ick.”
Enamoured with the masculinist impulses of cinema past (think Tarantino and Kubrick), movies such as Mollner’s are exemplary of a recent trend in horror filmmaking that has cemented its hold over the last decade or so, with writer-directors like Ti West and Oz Perkins leading the pack with cinephilic films concerned firstly with deeply referential aesthetics.
What could have once been a novel take on genre filmmaking borne of the 21st century is now so overdone that its predictability mirrors those less narratively ambitious stories that movies such as Strange Darling are trying to invert with a distanced yet smug postmodern irony. Mollner’s film, while not the worst offender of the bunch, continues the trend of moviemaking that is aestheticized, some might argue, to the point of self-flagellating autofetishism.
Perhaps, instead of filmmakers continuing this almost compulsive drive to announce themselves as the enfant terrible of arthouse horror they could just … make a great slasher flick?
Special to The Globe and Mail