Electric ladyland

STRANGE DARLING

2024

Written and directed by JT Mollner

Spoilers: insofar as I can't think of anything more pointless than doing a non-"spoiler" review of Strange Darling, high

So Strange Darling represents something kind of special, in an industrial sense, and while the modest but steady drumbeat of hype over the film didn't hurt, to this reviewer the industrial uniqueness of it was by some margin the most important thing getting me out to a theater for it.  The film, as I understand it, opens with a title card announcing—rather unnecessarily, to my mind—that it was shot on 35mm, emphasizing that it was at least going to be an aesthetic throwback.  (I was very slightly late, but in any case, I came in about forty seconds after it began, so when I did it had actually already arrived at another throwback device, a riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that, to the extent I caught it, relates that this is the "true" story of a serial killer, noticeably doing so without naming that serial killer or providing that serial killer's colorful sobriquet, because... hey, let's not get ahead of our fucking selves.)  Well, I didn't go see Strange Darling because it's shot in 35mm, a fair number of movies are still shot in 35mm, and that's very nice, but not in itself a selling point.  The selling point is that Strange Darling is shot in 35mm by Giovanni Ribisi, who, if you don't recognize the name, you would almost certainly recognize the face, because the main phase of his career in film has been as a capable and well-liked character actor, whom I do not believe has ever really wanted for some manner of A-movie work.

And nonetheless Ribisi got it into his head that he was going to be a director of photography—prior to this, he's worked on some short projects, but this is his very first feature—and as far as I am aware, this is just the most absolutely abnormal professional path.  Actors shade into behind-the-camera functions fairly regularly—frequently as writers, and of course everybody wants to direct—but it really seems like if you have decided, in your 40s—your late 40s!—that you want to be a cinematographer, and you apparently plow your own money into a feature film in presumptively large part just to ensure you get that job (for Ribisi also produced), the assumption must be that you really, truly mean it.  And someone who really, truly means to be a cinematographer in 2024 hopefully has something to fucking say about the state of cinematography in 2024.

On this count, Strange Darling pays off.  To get the negative out of the way, Ribisi is not turning in technically faultless work: there's some bumbling with focus that, to be clear, is more an exception than a rule (and even might've been better if it were more of a rule, because I half-suspect it was intentional, or at least permitted to occur, as a way of instilling a little bit more tactility to the camerawork on behalf of a grisly horror-inflected thriller).  But for the most part this is lovely, and by any possible estimation very professional, work.  It's more of a 90s/early 00s shot-on-film look he's captured than the 70s touchstones that Strange Darling is at least gesturing towards, but as the film itself is blatantly more "90s revival of grindhouse thrills" than it is the actual 70s stuff, I can't really argue with that choice.  Much of it takes place in broad daylight in rural Oregon, and the colors and textures of the forests and highways pop beautifully, but naturalistically, and at least during the opening sequence, there's some really marvelous uses of sunny highlights that blow out just enough to give the film a sort of overwrought vibe from the get-go.  Later on, night sequences have a tendency to get some lush solid color treatments (principally as a matter of lighting and not filters or correction, too), and it's not Ribisi's fault the conversation in the Blue Dimension goes on for what is, I suppose literally, at least one full reel, as either a mordant joke that doesn't play or a public service announcement that still reads more like the draft notes of an author trying to figure out exactly how to apologize for his own semi-irresponsible film.  Lens and aperture choices are intelligent, so, by current standards, superb.  And there's a delightful split-diopter somewhere in the middle that is, honest, an extraordinarily creative use of that technique, taking the closer subject in super-shallow focus so what our attention is forcefully directed to, along with the further subject's diffidence, is what she's fiddling with in the far foreground and he doesn't see.  Hugely solid work, then.  For any given movie in 1994 you'd call it above average; and for a movie in 2024, if they gave Ribisi an Oscar nomination, I'd give the Academy a thumbs up.

That does not entirely conclude "the good things I have to say about Strange Darling," though anything else nice is going to be even more backhanded, such as "Willa Fitzgerald is putting on a savage, attention-grabbing performance in search of a role," or "I didn't complain in Die Hard when John McClane's injuries were obviously debilitating, and I guess this is also an action-oriented thriller, so I should be fair and not complain about this," that sort of thing.  Clearly, there aren't many more compliments in my bag here.  In twelve hours I've kind of come to despise Strange Darling without thinking it's all that bad, because it puts me in a position I hate being in as regards other viewers, not so much because it's been universally praised (it's not, and the semi-irresponsible part of it ensures that you needn't look hard to find somebody effectively calling you evil if you liked it), but I earnestly don't know if I can honestly discuss it without collaterally insulting a lot of people.  It's like this: Strange Darling is a movie evidently made with an assumed audience comprised exclusively of media illiterates.

Strange Darling—formally-speaking, according to its own title card, I should say Strange Darling: A Thriller In Six Chapters, and with a full title like that, I'm not sure further criticism is necessary—does indeed tell its story in six chapters.  (Actually, scratch that, it doesn't: it tells it in six chapters and an epilogue, which is, you know, fine, whatever, so this is probably the bitchiest complaint I'm going to make about it, but somebody should mention to writer-director JT Mollner what the word "epilogue" connotes, because it does not connote "seven more minutes of narrative material that flows in real time directly out of the sixth chapter.")  Anyway, Strange Darling is arranged into chapters, with chapter headings, very post-Tarantino and already slightly obnoxious—the chronological narrative of the movie does not have chapters naturally, and while it's not "real time" all the way, it's a normally compressed twelve hours or so spent with the same two figures.  But the important thing is that those chapters are out of order.  Ooh.  How experimental.

It is, of course, not experimental, it's a time-tested tool and Mollner is using it as bluntly as possible.  It goes, so far as I recall, like this: Chapter 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, 6; accordingly, we begin in 3, which finds the unnamed man credited, upfront, as "THE DEMON" (Kyle Gallner) chasing down the unnamed woman credited as "THE LADY" (Fitzgerald), in his giant performative dickhead black truck while she harriedly flees in a 70s Ford Pinto for what may be specifically referentially reasons that escape me, but regardless are meant to situate the film, like the narrated "serial killer" expository card, in a 70s pastiche zone.  Friends, are you ready to have your expectations subverted?

The film, speaking more broadly now, relates the tale of the world's worst date: seemingly, an online dating meet-up has gone well enough to get the guy and the gal to a motel, where they dance around the prospect of fucking, she being more aggressive and he more retiring, and at some point I've got to get to the spoilers: she foists a precipitous, rather dark and heavy BDSM scene on this near-stranger, cajoling him into dominating her in ways he's not really into, and I could go on, if I wished, about two things the movie does suboptimally throughout this entire preface (though, due to nonlinearity, we're like halfway through the damn movie).  The first is that, even if I didn't think it's being offensive about kink (it is, but it's so addled about kink I don't think it's even managing to make any point beyond "ew"), it's using BDSM the same way it's using its structure, as a clumsy blind; second, that it is somehow taking these two chiseled beauties and not merely failing to make this erotic for us, it's failing to make it comprehensible how it's erotic for them, doing BDSM the way a lot of movies do BDSM, as an actual non-NC-17 (almost non-R) replacement for sexuality, the kind of thing you do without any of your erogenous zones being touched, and as far as our fella is concerned, the movie is not making a really plausible case for why it takes him so long to lose interest and bail, as the hot-and-cold, can-you-touch-my-dick-at-least? flow of the scene is annoying and deeply unsexy.  I can recall when using sexuality as padding in movies (Strange Darling hoists itself up by its nonlinear bootstraps and a closing shot that lasts what feels like all afternoon to just 96 minutes with credits) at least gave you sexuality.

But he does lose interest and bail; unfortunately, he has been drugged with a paralytic, because the woman is that serial killer that we already know the movie's about, and she takes the opportunity to turn the tables and then some, torturing him till the morning.  She is undoubtedly about ready to finish him off, but the paralytic's subsided just enough, and she's been careless enough, for the man—turns out he is, incidentally, a cop—to reach the ankle-holstered gun she never noticed, and blow a chunk out of her shoulder.  She runs, some narrative convolutions regarding firing guns off in a motel and a wounded near-naked woman bolting out of the room apparently get un-convoluted in a mysterious offscreen space, and what we have going forward, or going backward, is a rape-revenge movie except, get this, the rapist is the chick and the revenger is the dude.

Do this in linear time—and rewrite this screenplay for linear time, because it would have to be a little different—and I think I could walk out of Strange Darling thinking it's fine, even if it didn't surprise me, though the crazy-making thing about it is that I daresay Strange Darling would have had a vastly better chance of surprising me if it had.  Because that's the only reason this is cut up into "chapters" and thrown around: to conceal information that, by dint of concealing it, makes it incredibly, stupidly obvious to anybody who's even vaguely familiar with movies, or even just primed to ask their media, "why are you doing this the way you're doing this?"  It's possibly the worst exercise in structure I've ever seen as a result; it's already a movie marketed around "a surprise," and what would be "surprising" in the context of a rape-revenge or serial killer film?  Well, a female rapist/serial-killer.  So it's essentially already confirmed its own twist in the first couple of minutes of movie when it begins in medias res—in "Chapter 3"—with a scene that is obviously designed to tell you nothing while exploiting your assumptions.

That might have even been okay, except it's clear JT Mollner is certain he's putting one over on you—the image that pops into my head is a bad magician smiling smugly, genuinely unaware the coin fell out of his palm—and so what it devolves into is a whole lot of waiting until the movie decides to expressly tell us what we already know.  (It somehow manages to do this even in the shot-to-shot structure in addition to the overarching scaffold of the narrative macrostructure: the dark BDSM scene arrives with a jolt because Mollner wants you to believe it's The Demon coming out; and while it's more successful than the macrostructure, in that I had an instant of doubt, it's cut around so clumsily that the effect is the opposite and, after that instant passes, the "twist" is even more obvious.)  Maybe it still wouldn't be a problem, as such, if twisting things around wasn't the end-all-be-all of Mollner's whole prospect here: a pure gimmick—an outright crutch—that apparently obviated any need he might have otherwise felt to make a movie that had characters or told a story—the "Electric Lady" is one confusingly inconsistent and underconceived movie-movie serial killer, just a grab-bag of "I SEE DEVILS" but also sex stuff—or even just possessed a plot, and while I have some grudging admiration for the pure straightforwardness of "the plot" that is here, buried under the baroque presentation of it, it doesn't really result in much in the way of good thriller setpieces or interesting performances or anything you might come to a movie to see.

About the only sequence idea Mollner even has, outside of the opening "Chapter 3," which is at least kinetic, is to send our hero and villainess to a rural farmhouse occupied by weirdos played by Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr., who do provide the sometimes-funny movie's most oddball jokes, albeit through no virtues of their own, just visual gags regarding their disgusting decadent trashpile sugar Sunday breakfasts and their Scott Baio jigsaw puzzle, and an ambient gag regarding a podcast, I think, being played on their outside loudspeakers for no articulable reason, where a theorist holds forth on sasquatches.  I have toyed with the idea that this random noise is about sasquatches because sasquatches are only the slightest bit less real than female sex murderers, but I cannot believe that Strange Darling is that smart.  The sequence idea, anyway, is founded on the same single, repetitive elaboration on "theme" that Mollner's got; I give him credit for having a clever-enough theme, even if it has meant that Mollner has delivered something more akin to a feature-length idea for a movie than an actual one, but that's kind of the deal, the Lady almost gets captured, but can invariably use her femininity as an inkcloud for just long enough to, e.g., kill somebody and steal their car, or kill somebody before they realize her extreme reluctance to call the police despite her circumstances means that she is, herself, a danger.  One might argue that this gets old even when there's only twenty odd minutes of it.  It is certainly not very creative, and requires one cop (Madisen Beaty) to be written as a bit of an essentialist moron and another one to be written as a regular moron (Steven Michael Quezada) who forgets to remind her that "the Demon" is the one who called them.

As a junk thriller, it would probably play.  So I don't know if it's the worst thing about it, then, because I was more aggravated by the movie's arrogance and the bouts of tediousness that arrogance occasioned; but that structure absolutely throttles any emotional investment in what ought to be a visceral and elemental struggle.  You can discourse about the movie, if you like, it's a free country, but maybe there's some value to a rape-revenge film that actively places a man in a situation he's not especially likely to face (well, a straight man, anyway) but which a woman is, as a shortcut to empathy.  Or we can just have fun with a thrill; see above, country, free.  But even knowing, deep in my brain's heart, where this was going to go, the rhythmless, flowless structure gives you nothing to attach yourself to; no sensation of getting in over your head.  Arranging it this way just means we get a freakshow redneck out the gate, trying to blow a woman's head off and leave her corpse in the woods, and you've given yourself a real challenge if you decide to do some "I bet you're wondering how I got here" bullshit with that if you also want it to be affecting, and it's simply not a challenge Mollner proves himself capable of meeting.

Score: 5/10