Apr 10

Apr 10 Movie Review : Strange Darling (2024)

You know that optical illusion that's a rabbit, but also a duck? Depending on what you want to see (or what you’re being told to see), the actual drawing you see is going to actually change in your mind. Now, apply that idea to everything. What you see or intuitively understand in any given situation is what you want to see or what you’re being told to understand. JT Mollner's sophomore feature film Strange Darling weaponizes your own assumptions against you for your sick and twisted viewing pleasure.

Strange Darling tells the story of the lady (Willa Fitzgerald) and the Demon (Kyle Gallner) who seem caught in a deadly, but straightforward game of cat-and-mouse the former is the prey and the latter is the quiet, but vicious predator. It’s deliberately told in a non linear way, so you're dropped in the middle of the story, as the Demon chases the lady down the road and into the forest and as you go back-and-forth in time, you realize you’ve made a whole bunch of assumptions—assumptions that were never true in the first place.

Suddenly, the rabbit’s a duck and nothing is what you thought it was.

Obviously, Strange Darling is a play on slasher movie conventions where the killer’s always a man and the victim is always a woman. Violence against women is a real problem that we have in the world, but if you want to enjoy this movie you're gonna have to suspend your disbelief and think beyond that dichotomy because traveling miles beyond that dichotomy at full speed is what Strange Darling does. What you see on screen never stops feeling familiar even when the movie shows you over and over it’s a construction.

Although it is an extreme (and fictional) example, Strange Darling explores the idea of gender norms and performance as social currency. The lady becomes several different people as the movie goes along and never really quite reveals herself, at least not until the very end. She takes on roles that other people can intuitively recognized: the good-girl-who-wants-to-have-a-little-fun, the slut, the victim and others I can’t tell you because I would be spoiling the movie.

None of them are her, not entirely. But all of them are what someone else expects her to be, and she knows exactly how to leverage that. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth the film is quietly screaming: the most effective survival strategy is knowing what people expect from you and weaponizing it. It’s not about being good. It’s not about being bad. It’s about being believable. And if someone thinks they’re in control—because you’re giving them what they want—they’ll let their guard down. That’s when you win.

Is that manipulative? Obviously. Is it dark? Absolutely. But the movie doesn’t paint this as a deviation from human nature—it paints it as the blueprint. Strange Darling isn't arguing that people are evil; it's arguing that people are transactional by using he most extreme and lethal example possible. Every interaction is a negotiation, a hustle, a game with stakes you often don't realize until it’s too late. These people here being everyone thinking they’re giving assistance to a damsel in distress.

You know what Strange Darling also is? Superbly crafted. You could argue that the way the film is presented to you is more interesting than the story it tells. Whether it's by framing shots in a way slasher movies usually do only to reveal a different truth underneath or by using weird, long dolly shots where the lady sheds a context to embrace another, the story of Strange Darling never hits you where you expect it.

The film borrows from slasher iconography not to pay homage but to gaslight you—to remind you that the familiar is just a costume for something stranger. This isn’t "style over substance." That’s too easy. This is style-as-substance. Delivered any other way—linearly, traditionally, respectfully—it would be dead on arrival. But in this form, it’s electrified. It races through your brain like a thought you don’t want to admit you’ve had.

There's also something oddly poetic and haunting about the cinematography of Strange Darling. It feels almost too bright and oversaturated to be real. It's not quite a nightmare, but rather an anxious thought about your Tinder date of next Friday. It looks as if Texas Chainsaw Massacre and real life met halfway. The result is a visual landscape that doesn’t feel like horror—it feels like foreboding made beautiful. Not quite fear, not quite nostalgia—something in between. Like déjà vu, but with a knife.

It's oddly endearing, too. Not in the way a rom-com is endearing, but in the way a person is endearing when they say something completely unhinged and totally sincere. You respect the audacity, even if you're not entirely sure what's happening.

Strange Darling shouldn't quite work, but it does. It’s a gorgeous, deranged, meticulously orchestrated assault against our Judeo-Christian values and on gender-based prejudice as well as a fun nod to horror movie history and its attitude about being so morally bankrupt is what makes its charm. It's a movie that's obviously a labor of love for everyone involved and it shows. There aren't enough movies that flip off the conventions of taste without ever being tasteless in the way Strange Darling does.

You might not love it, but you'll remember it.