J.T. Mollner, best known for his debut film Outlaws & Angels, gives us a grisly bloodied serial killer thriller with a clever twist: the killer is presumed by us to be the victim until… well until it is too late. By the time we come to know that the supposed killer is actually the victim, Mollner’s ingenious screenplay has raced way past our wildest calculations.
The feral film opens with a familiar horror trope: a frantic woman in a car being shot at by a man.
Nothing is what it seems. Not in this film at least.
We first meet a couple on the dark dangerous night in a car. They have no name, and only one aim: a one-night stand of uninhibited sex. The conversation in the car is redolent with ironic suggestions. That we unquestioningly presume the woman (Willa Fitzgerald, scary) to be the potential victim is a sly corkscrew twist to the conventional man-woman equation.
Why should the woman always be the prey and the man the predator? Saucily reversing the man-monster myth, Strange Darling sets off on a nightmarish journey with a woman serial killer and her blind date Kyle Gallner, known simply as the Demon.
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The sharp tongue-in-shriek screenplay sets up the Man and the Woman in traditional roles and then turns the gender equation on its head.
This is the part I like the best. The cat-and-mouse game between the two that ensues left me cold. There are too many jumpscares in the rest of the film, too many blood-soaked corpses and too much mayhem diminishes the impact of the narrative. The message on gender biases gets drowned in a pool of blood.
Interestingly, the ‘Scream’ play is divided into six non-linear chapters, capturing our attention until the end. But this is not a manipulative attention-grabber. We are hooked more by the idea of a woman serial killer and how gender prejudices enable her killing spree than by what actually happens in the percolating plot.
In the end when she (again!) plays the victim card, a female cop unwittingly helps her to escape.
More than the mayhem it’s the thought of one woman shooting and killing her way through a gauntlet of gender biases that binds us to this unconventional crime drama.