All the right scenes, not necessarily in the right order. JT Mollner's festival breakout Strange Darling follows July's slasher redux In a Violent Nature in offering another deconstruction and reconstruction of careworn genre-movie dynamics. Its titles announce both a film shot entirely on 35mm and a story in six chapters before Mollner serves early notice of scrambling intent by presenting us with Chapter Three: the misadventures of a bloodied peroxide blonde (Willa Fitzgerald), pursued through the wide-open spaces of middle America by a coke-snorting, shotgun-touting male (Kyle Gallner) introduced in the credits as The Demon. Inevitably, this opening gambit proves a feint and a lure - what we might expect from a conventional thriller - being as it is only the midpoint of a story that proves somewhat more complex (or, more precisely yet, twistier) than first suggested. That story is gradually revealed, in all its gory glory, as Mollner shoots off at tangents: a flying visit to a woodland property housing a disappointingly underused Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a couple with eccentric eating and leisure habits; a flashback to a motel hook-up where the leads prove capable of more than the grunting and yelping they're introduced doing, and Mollner reveals the events of Chapters Two through Six are but an extension of sexual power games; multiple renditions of the signature song "Love Hurts"; and a midfilm twist that may even be guessable from the bare-bones synopsis above.
Rest assured, everything slots together eventually, in ways that are clever more often than not. We are encouraged to guess which chapter will be coming up next, and fair begged to regard the whole as what we might call a re-Nolanification of noir. The leads, semi-familiar TV/PPV/VOD faces who've never been granted a platform such as this, commit to this chicanery, particularly in what is - chronologically at least - the characters' initial encounter, fraught as it proves with bad behaviour, heinous language and pressing issues of consent. Here, we acknowledge (maybe even admire) the high levels of risk involved, and that there are plentiful moments where, in the hands of a clumsier filmmaker, a performer might have been made to look foolish or stupid. Still, I kept wondering whether chicanery is all that Strange Darling is, maybe even the best that it is. If this narrative has any bearing whatsoever in male-female relations, it's that arrived at by a gifted yet unworldly screenwriting student, so bamboozled by the desires of the women around him - what turns them on, what gets them off - that he feels compelled to write about it. It's doubtless healthier that this befuddlement finds its way into script form, much as it's healthier that Tarantino pays his actresses to film their feet rather than harassing women at bus stops. But it still smells sour and resistible whenever it begins to seep off the screen and into the audience's lap. The real revelation with Strange Darling is that it is a fundamentally reactionary text; however Mollner shuffles it, all he's ultimately landed at is a novel way of filming - and punishing - a bloodied, semi-naked heroine. Plenty of achievement besides: it's knotty and tricky, adult to some degree, what film students delight in labelling as problematic, and actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi capably replicates the hazy, sundappled look of certain key 1970s horrors. Yet its sexual politics seem to date from the same era, which is why Strange Darling registers as one of those achievements that only leaves one suspicious of it, and its maker.
Strange Darling is now showing in selected cinemas.
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