In this cheeky, cunningly assembled thriller, a serial killer gets a satisfying and surprising comeuppance.
A movie that’s best experienced stone cold, “Strange Darling” is so dependent on its surprises — one head-snapping twist, with several judiciously spaced lesser shocks — that to reveal any one of them would be critical malpractice.
A crawling onscreen text, read by Jason Patric, informs us that what we are about to see is the dramatization of a spree killer’s final, vicious acts. Thus primed, we’re thrown into the middle of a frantic car chase as a terrified young woman in scarlet scrubs races to escape a shotgun-wielding man in a pickup truck. She is known only as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), and she is bleeding from a head wound; he is The Demon (Kyle Gallner), his sleazy mustache and snorts of cocaine familiar bad-guy signifiers. We’ve got this, we think, settling in for some serial-killer comfort viewing. We could not be more wrong.
Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions. Flexing back and forth in time, the writer and director, JT Mollner, bets the house on a mechanism that repeatedly asks us to reassess what has gone before. Cunning as it is, structure is not the movie’s sole strength. Both Z Berg’s haunting, otherworldly pop songs and Giovanni Ribisi’s eloquent photography (it’s the actor’s first stint as a feature cinematographer) bathe the film’s violence in an unexpected dreaminess. In one pivotal scene, shot with shadowy intensity, flirtation and threat alternate so frequently that the flickering power dynamics are completely destabilizing.
Less complicated by far are Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a pair of doomsday preppers who think the bleeding woman at their door has been attacked by a Sasquatch. They will soon learn that there are some problems even bear spray can’t solve.
Strange Darling
Rated R for cutting, ketamine and lots of killing. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
