There’s that rarest of fruit ripening: a new subgenre to horror. Horror is inherently maximalist – you want to see the blood pool, count all the monster’s fangs. Yet films like revisionist slasher In a Violent Nature and pinhole camera found footage shocker The Outwaters have a minimalist bent to them, a taste for reduction that goes beyond elegance and instead relishes giving the audience the bare minimum as and when needed to scare and disturb them. Now psychological serial killer drama Strange Darling shows the same kind of narrative restraint while indulging our tastes for a good old human hunt.
The publicity for Strange Darling refers to it as “from the producers of Barbarian,” and while such Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connections normally have no weight, there’s a real connection here. Zach Cregger’s gruesome and ingenious twist on the home invasion horror used surprise reveals to unfurl its true narrative. Writer/director JT Mollner is equally tricksy with revealing his story, breaking Strange Darling into six chapters and then showing them out of order. However, that discord adds intricacies and revelations. When we first see the Lady (Fitzgerald, Scream: The TV Series, The Fall of the House of Usher, Dare Me) she’s running in raw fear from a gun-toting maniac known only as the Devil (Gallner, Smile, Scream).
It seems so obvious, so prosaic, if intriguingly and ghoulishly executed. But this is chapter 3, so we know there is information we are lacking. When Mollner suddenly vaults to chapter 5, we see the outcomes for certain characters – most specifically, Begley Jr. and Hershey as two adorable retirees living a pastoral existence – when hunter and hunted arrive at their door. But what we really have is four missing chapters, and Mollner delivers the story like cupcakes instead of as one big slab of cake: just as sweet, but with portion restraint that makes the story even more deliciously warped.
That’s the other point of connection to Barbarian: As the story is revealed – in Cregger’s case, as layers of an onion, here as a jigsaw puzzle – our perspective, our sympathies, our understanding of what we have been watching to this point switches, twitches, flips and inverts. The script plays a game of consent and there’s no safe word. In that way, Strange Darling feels akin to the original transgressive slasher, Wes Craven’s landmark of feel bad cinema, The Last House on the Left. As soon as you sat in front of the screen, you’d already said yes to what was coming. Mollner even softens the blow in exactly the same way that Craven did, with a soundtrack that initially seems utterly inappropriate. Yet just as David Hess subverted how country and jazz often laud violent criminals, the soothing, folk-tinged pop of Z Berg has a disconcerting romantic edge, one that Mollner uses like a stiletto.
Strange Darling undoubtedly has precedents and peers, but like them it’s an enthrallingly unique film. There’s no point at which it feels like Mollner is simply aping serial killer horror, even if that’s a clear influence. Instead, the cinematography by Giovanni Ribisi – yes, that Giovanni Ribisi – is by turns calm and terrifying, soothingly sensual and jaw-droppingly unhinged. His work captures and complements stellar performances, with Fitzgerald as the bloodied lead and Gallner providing harmonies that shift their duet from major to minor chords as the story demands. At every point, Strange Darling is a grisly melding of deviously experimental form and terrifying function.
This article appears in August 23 • 2024.
