Strange Darling review: All style and (some) substance

Voguish from head to toe, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling uses every single frame to deliver a riveting cat-and-mouse game on the shoulders of David Lynch and Brian De Palma. 

In the year 2024, when the average moviegoer fan has seen the trailer for Speak No Evil more times than they’ve seen their family, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling has shockingly remained on the back burner. It didn’t get much traction in marketing until just a couple of months before release, and only attached with an ominous “coming soon” instead of an actual date. Which is a damn shame, because Strange Darling is easily one of the best genre films of the year.

Love is blind.

Willa Fitzgerald (The Fall of the House of Usher) plays “The Lady”—the unnamed protagonist who is on the run from an alleged serial killer (Kyle Gallner) after a fun night in a hotel room goes terribly wrong. She finds solace in an old hippie couple (Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.), but they soon also find themselves targets of this vicious manhunt. 

To dive any deeper into Strange Darling would be doing it a disservice. So much of its appeal comes from going in completely blind and watching it unfold minute by minute. While the story itself isn’t much to write home about, its style does all the heavy lifting. Strange Darling breaks thing up into six chapters and uses non-linear storytelling to keep the suspense at an all-time high. The film begins at Chapter 3, where The Lady is in a thrilling car chase trying to escape this wicked foe. It’s a sparse start, leaving the audience to connect the pieces of this harrowing puzzle. Mollner heavily relies on this device (sometimes a little too much) but for the most part, it’s fun as hell. 

Simple pleasures.

That being said, the film wouldn’t be nearly as impactful if it weren’t for its own cleverness. The narrative is pretty bare-bones, and the characters are incredibly one-dimensional. Some would say it’s more about the pursuit than anything else, but seeing where the story goes and giving the characters a little more personality and background would give them much more staying power. Fortunately, Fitzgerald and Gallner are brilliant as the desperate final girl and the sadistic serial killer.

Strange Darling is shot entirely on 35 mm. To use it to its full capability, actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (Boiler Room) makes every frame rich with vibrant texture. The motel’s neons give it a proper seedy feel, and the farmhouse bursts with bright pastoral colors. Even the Oregon woods feel alive with the blend of grainy green and natural sunlight. Despite this being his feature debut as a credited DP, Ribisi has actually been practicing with his own equipment for over 15 years, and his love for the craft shows in every frame. 

The bottom line.

In a year where most horror releases have been middling, Strange Darling comes out of nowhere with an impressive showcase of filmmaking. Mollner takes an exhausted plotline and makes it refreshing and eclectic—something he should consider “a checkmate and more.”

Strange Darling is now playing in select theaters. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Magenta Light Studios. You can read more reviews by Yasmin Kleinbart here.