Director JT Mollner’s Strange Darling premiered at Fantastic Fest last fall to massive acclaim. And that good luck charm with critics only continued, as the film currently carries a 96% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And I did not like this movie! I did not like it one bit. I am going to attempt to discuss this in ways that tell you very little about what’s going on here, because the twisty nature of it and the way it unfolds are worthy of a ‘go in blind’ experience. As always, my review today will be spoiler free. But it might be more beneficial to you as a viewer to not read anything before you see the film. Go look at the trailer, which I’ll link below this review. It doesn’t tell you anything more than I will. If that trailer interests you and you want to see this film, stop reading this review and make a plan to see the film, and maybe come back to this review at a later point.

A cat and mouse game unfolds between a mysterious psychopathic killer and the woman who he’s just had a one night stand with. 

Yes, my plot summary is one sentence long. Yes, there’s more going on here. I find a great deal of it problematic. Strange Darling reminds me of that string of movies that came out after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction where it seemed like every fresh-out-of-film-school bro in America wanted to make themselves a Tarantino. It sure looks great (JT Mollner somehow convinced acclaimed character actor Giovanni Ribisi to shoot this), and the score is good. One of the few things I like about this movie is its non-linear structure. Strange Darling unfolds in six title-card chapters and an epilogue, shown out of order. And the way that unfolds is compelling and kept me interested in what would happen. But once you get past the initial big twist, it’s a bit all downhill from there.

Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner are quite good here, and we also have Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey (who I have not seen in forever), in supporting roles. And nobody is ever doing this movie halfway, the performances are all well done. But what they are given to portray is so surface level, and the film never has any interest in digging into their characters on any deeper level. The film kicks off with an opening crawl reminiscent of a true crime documentary where a narrator reads you the horrifying past of the serial killer depicted in this film, and where the story finds this person in our narrative. And it all feels very clunky and poorly done. I can’t really tell you anything about why these characterizations did or did not work for me, because that would constitute spoilers, so let’s move on.

Before we get to that expository opening crawl, we are told in another title card after the studio logos that the film you’re about to see was shot entirely on 35mm film. I love it when films do this. But the fact that this film announces this like it’s some miraculous achievement at the jump, when the list of recent films that are shot on 35mm as opposed to digital, is longer than you would think, feels incredibly self indulgent. And that self indulgence is a thing that kind of plagues Strange Darling the entire way through. It seems so satisfied with itself for jumping back and forth between this story, only revealing what is necessary in any given moment. And normally I would applaud a movie for forcing its audience to pay attention to small details. But the way the camera lingers over a thing that will come up later, telegraphs the message ‘okay, are you paying attention?! This is going to be important later! Wake up!’ And it almost feels like Mollner does not trust his viewer to get there on their own.

Overall, I had significant problems with the way the characters are portrayed in Strange Darling, and I get what JT Mollner wants us to think he’s going for here, but there’s something more insidious below that. While I want to champion original films, and tell audiences to go see them, I think there are some significant problems in this film’s worldview that I cannot fully get into without spoiling crucial aspects of this film’s story. Because while it’s twisty the entire way through, there is a central twist where the film started to lose me, and then it just got worse from there. Writer/director JT Mollner will obviously get another chance, and I look forward to whatever that film is, because there is something interesting in the root level about this film’s vision. But this one did not work for me. I’m glad everyone else seems to be having a good time, though.