Strange Darling

written by Charles Elmore

Strange Darling

written & directed by JT Mollner

Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey

**** stars - theatrical - first run

Willa Fitzgerald as The Lady in Strange Darling

JT Mollner’s hypnotic new thriller Strange Darling is an invigorating work of genre filmmaking. From the first frame, Mollner and his crew conduct a thrilling tour de force of filmmaking, showing that there is still life to be pulled out of the textural, psychological impact film can have on us as viewers.

In this waning summer season of movie releases, we seem to be experiencing an abundance of riches when it comes to horror, suspense, and thriller offerings in 2024. So far this year, we've seen Longlegs, Trap, MaXXXine, In a Violent Nature—and that’s just in the past few months, with more still to come. Of all the films I had on my radar, I must admit Strange Darling wasn’t initially one of them. Based on early reports from SXSW 2023, it sounded not too dissimilar to Longlegs or Cuckoo—at least at a cursory glance. However, once I found a moment to take a closer look, my curiosity was immediately piqued.

Like many, I was immediately intrigued by the involvement of its director of photography, Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi, a gifted actor who began his career in TV and sitcoms in the 1980s, moved into more notable roles as an adult in the '90s. He played Frank Jr. in Friends and Chad in Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do. He’s memorable in the '99 remake of the '60s TV show Mod Squad and has one of the most heartbreaking scenes in Saving Private Ryan as medic Wade. If you haven't seen his work in films like Richard Linklater’s Suburbia or the many other great entries in his filmography, you should definitely check them out. He’s exceptional. So, when I first saw his name listed as a cinematographer, I had to look it up to confirm: Is this the same guy?

It is the same guy, and the thrilling work on display here makes me hope Ribisi continues down this path. The tension, ever-shifting perspectives, and intensity in Strange Darling are gorgeous. What's more surprising than its visual beauty is how intentionally told this film is. It digs into what you think it will be and twists a knotty, brutal grip of gender dynamics and storytelling around your throat, not letting go for 119 minutes.

What Mollner, Ribisi, and the two leads, Willa Fitzgerald as The Lady and Kyle Gallner as The Demon, have achieved with Strange Darling is an astonishing throwback to dark, thrilling, complex psychological thrillers. The cat-and-mouse structure is cleverly designed with a distinctly '90s vibe. What Mollner and the filmmaking crew—cast and craft alike—create is a constant, visceral dance of tension, creative visual revelation, and a bouquet of filmmaking tricks.

From its marketing, Strange Darling is pitched as a one-night stand gone wrong turned serial-killer chase—and smartly so. You’re led to expect a run-of-the-mill adult thriller: a hapless woman escapes the torturous clutches of a murderous man who may have been doing nefarious things to her just minutes before the title card appears. A murderous, unconventional chase ensues.

Strange Darling opens with a loaded question “Are you a serial killer?”. It’s asked- mostly in jest but though entirely loaded with dread by the Lady, played by Ella Fitzgerald, to a rugged Boy Scout type (Gallner) sitting in the drivers seat of an expensive pickup, parked outside a roadside motel. The type that bills by the hour. From there a playful game of dos and don’ts, consents and boundaries are set by this nervous young woman (Fitzgerald) for whats about to go down in that motel.

Once inside their energy is clumsy, with power roles shifting from seduction to seduction, until this two-step dance quickly escalates into a tautly choreographed sprint through the minefield of modern dating, sexual boundaries, and power dynamics.

from there the film becomes something akin to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer told like a gender-flipped, psycho-sexual Tom-and-Jerry rom-com unfolding over six crosscutting chapters and shifting perspectives. Throughout Mollner doesn’t just wink at the anxiety surrounding today’s fraught sexual politics and gender dynamics; he upends them, escalating the tension into something kinkier and deadlier.

Fitzgerald and Gallner are commanding as The Lady and The Demon, and Fitzgerald’s hypnotically feral performance gives Amy Elliot Dunne a run for her sociopathic money. This is a sort of cat-and-mouse game between Gallner and her becomes one where you can’t quite tell who is the cat and who is the mouse.

The game they play is deliciously intense, with Gallner, Fitzgerald at Mollner ratcheting up the tension to the shocking denouement. Fitzgerald, in particular, tears into her role, but Gallner’s performance is equally gripping. It all builds into a climactic confrontation that sometimes feels like Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, with shades of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper -1974) and I Spit On Your Grave (Meir Zarchi -1978). Also, as an aside between this and In A Violent Nature, the calming and peaceful tranquility of a nice meditative forest is having quite a moment.

There’s also a phenomenal appearance by Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey as an oddly sanguine, doomsday-prepping hippie couple living in rural Oregon. Their grand craftsman home is surrounded by loudspeakers blaring a mysterious sermon- or warning, though it’s unclear where it’s coming from or whether it’s a warning for outsiders or directed to the inhabitants inside.

The level of commitment to craft on display in Strange Darling elevates what might at first glance feel like just another attempt at a kind of Eli Roth or Rob Zombie grindhouse exercise churned through another Quentin Tarantino cinematic look pack. Instead, Mollner and crew seem intent on accomplishing more than just an aesthetic short hand for cool effect— Strange Darling delights in dedicating as much attention if not more to the dramatic stakes of the story and its structure as it does on its (bordering on) ostentatious aesthetics. Strange Darling isn’t all just winky references to films from a grittier, bygone era- softened and blunted for a flat-screen 4k crowd at home. From its use of color throughout the photography, costume and set design, to how simplistic the story’s structure is so meticulously shattered and then re-ordered to maximal effect. The film's telling in six chapters isn’t necessarily told in chronological order, but in a precise sequence that Mollner engineers perfectly for the story.

The film constantly surprises, never taking you where you expect. Just when you think you know, it goes even further, making you feel like you’re in capable hands. It all culminates in a deeply gratifying experience at the cinema and one worth seeking out in the abundance of genre fare available to audiences today. Strange Darling is a work of highly of confident genre-bending cinema - both timely and timeless.

-Charles Elmore

Minor Moving Images

MINOR MOVING IMAGES

Brief notes on an obsession by Charles Everett Elmore II

A "Major Motion Picture", as defined, means any film which is financed or distributed by a motion picture studio or distributor, at least according to lawinsider.com.

"A Major Motion Picture Event" is how films were often advertised during the flurry of trailers that flickered across shopping mall movie screens, drive-ins of my adolescence of the mid 80s and 1990s through the eventual corporatization and big boxification of movie going in the later half of the 90s on into the 2000s.

If you were going to be talking about a movie that fall when school started again, you made it a point to make it to the "movie event of the summer", lest you be caught with your proverbial movie pants down when everyone else laughs about the thing the guard does to Linda Hamilton in T2 and you look like a cheap dupe. If you didn’t want to seem like some simpleton at the Tupperware party, you know the idiot who thought problem child 2 was great, you’d better have seen Neil Jordan’s Crying Game before the second week of its theatrical run.

I was sat in front of a screen with a variation of a channel switcher at an early age. Practically at birth though not quite. While not my "first", an early "first movie" memory is watching the opening minutes of "A Nightmare On Elm Street" at the age of 5 (circa 1985) while no doubt at a party my mother, still barely in her 20s, dragged me along to. I made it to Nancy in the hallway in the bodybag and well I haven't been able to turn a terrified eye away from a flickering screen since. A universal baby sitter for many of my generation, the ubiquity and affordability of cable TV in the early 90s made for a (mostly) 24/7 media buffet for this unattended latchkey kid. Fill in the rest of the bored childhood of a single parent, working poor household with weekends in multiplexes, peak MTV and prime 90s comic books and my career choices seemed inevitable although in my case growing up in Claremore, Oklahoma especially narrow.

With what little my father was able to scratch together to send me to the only school we could afford I set off to learn a skill that could perhaps put me professionally and creatively in the arena where all this magic that I'd been captivated by all my life - an 18 month AA degree in Media Production at a tech school for art nerds called The Art Institute of Seattle. I’m sure in my fathers eyes all those hours watching anime on Sci-fi, 5 for $5 fridays at popcorn video or VH1s docs that rock weekend marathons instead of reading or excelling in athletics and academics like my classmates would be worth it. I fell in love with the craft as much as I fell in love with the language of the medium. I grew up with everything from Fern Gully to where the red fern grows, from Millers Crossing to A Clockwork Orange, been to all the cinematic wars and even brought the war home with John Rambo but it took college to expose me to Kurosawa, Bergman, Maya Daren, Un Chien Andalou and so much more. 99 was a titanic year for movies and being a lonely kid from a small town in Oklahoma going to school alone in Seattle and to sooth my isolation I occupied the scalloped environs of the cineplex odeon, the pacific place general cinema. I saw Pi at the broadway ave cinema. I remember seeing the trailer to Magnolia before Kevin Smith’s catholic scat comedy Dogma at the Uptown Theater and thinking about nothing else but those whip pans for the rest of the day. If it weren't for Harbor Video on 3rd and Lenora in Seattle, around the corner from my apartment, I never would've discovered Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson, Lynn Ramsey, Godard, Truffaut! If David Satlin my film theory professor hadn't declared in class, spring '99, that Verhoeven's Showgirls, still camp at the time, would eventually be heralded as a masterpiece of capital C cinema or that films have a language and grammar and often times are saying lots of things at once I might never have seen this medium beyond anything more than just some pop trifle to be consumed, judged and ultimately discarded in slavish anticipation of the next impermanent bauble of gratification.

Wether it was the cafeteria before 1st period or after the thursday-midnight screening, the conversation revolving around the film both leading up to and after was as much a primary part of the movie experience as watching it. Now it seems the conversation around these major motion pictures, these sources of magical inspiration and entertainment, the dialog that this medium that speaks no language yet speaks to all and gives a language to those who find it hard to speak seems to be ever increasingly turning into minor moving images. Where all we offer in commentary are cursory and fleeting observations, snark or bon motts on the misfires or ambitious failures. Like faded photos in our parents house we no longer revere these works in the same honor they seemed to have once held decades past.

Now in 2022, as the year comes to a close, many critics, bloggers, film twitter, the purists, all of them are clutching their pearls, wringing hands and waving handkerchiefs with a case of the vapors at the tenuous precipice that cinema finds itself in the current zeitgeist. Now some 135 years since the first sequential image of an object in motion (see this years NOPE from Jordan Peele for that cinematic nod to our mediums history) it seems MOVIES, and movie going itself, are at a fraught crossroads of relevance in our society. While the film twitter phalanx exchange opprobrium about Marvel this and Sight and Sound that the capitalist everywhere are figuring out how to turn this art-form into yet another consumer deliverable good that can be tailored direct to consumer (in this case the extreme viewpoint consumer; think hallmark movie or more dour and extreme, in the case of my home states industry, the hallmark movie for the hobby lobby crowd)

Film is such a special form of human expression in that it has the most universality in speaking to us as a race of beings. It is the lingua franca for when we are incapable of deciphering foreign tongues or voices. Much like the experience of human interaction itself, seeing a panoply of films from a tapestry of regions and cultures and storytellers can broaden the spectrum of your empathy. These empathy machines, as Roger Ebert coined them, have not only been there to entertain and anesthetize us to an extent but also to hold a mirror to ourselves. A reflecting mosaic holding ourselves accountable to history, to our community, to our culture through the same storytelling tradition as the pre-industrial oral storytellers and culture keepers. To diminish this art-form and how we view it in our culture to such minor and insignificant relevance in our culture would be analogous to letting a language - and the understanding of it - die out forever in favor of turning it into just another commodity to be profited off of. You know like it’s always been.

when I was at peak watching age, movies - and movie going itself - were always as much socially driven as they were driven by any force of marketing. You'd see a movie people were talking about as much as you'd see the movies the TV, radio or newspapers dedicated the most advertising ink or airwaves to. This has all certainly changed since the advent of streaming, and while streaming predates COVID, the 2020 pandemic will certainly go hand and glove with the historical significance of this era in movie going and movie watching, not to mention and probably more significantly, the impact on the the movie making side of the artform.

So at this perilous crossroads of the medium and the form’s manufacturing it is honestly an exciting and thrilling time while equally a bit disheartening. This is the time where, what does Miles Bron call them, the disrupters can come in and inject new life into this language, bring new stories through this medium to life, new myths given the cinematic treatment to edify and enlighten us, because films while always a portal into the current moment while also a reflection into the past are more often oracles of where we can be headed as a society and race. Like all art it can be a Molotov cocktail in the hands of the put upon, the abused, the marginalized, the obscure, the foreign, the beautiful, the necessary.

This art form matters too much to let it be discarded to the 5 dollar bin of human history and consumer culture. Where “new blood” can bring a new life to the form. Maybe we can bring them back to being major motion picture events.

It’s why I chose the name Minor Moving Images. In my adulthood, now 20 on years in a profession I honestly never thought I’d make it in let alone get to write thoughtful and impassioned criticism on, this artform matters more now to me than ever and my hope here at this outlet is to post observations on the artform, hot takes of current offerings, some thoughts on the medium’s history and occasionally maybe stories or anecdotes from my experience working on various film and television projects that I’ve been fortunate to work on and the artists and colleagues I get to work alongside.

- CEE II, 27 12 2022