Strange Darling: gotcha serial killer thriller delights in its own wicked games

Paraphrasing DW Griffith, Jean-Luc Godard once said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun; Strange Darling opens with a terrified blonde being chased down the backroads by a coke-snorting psychopath with a rifle. Such is the stuff that B-movie dreams are made of: the trick of JT Mollner’s thriller – and Strange Darling is nothing if not tricky – is that it gives its hypothetical midnight-movie audience everything they want, but not necessarily in the expected order, like a classic album being played on shuffle. 

To extend the musical analogy a bit: the opening image of Willa Fitzgerald’s unnamed heroine running in De Palma-ish slow motion towards the camera is scored to a tremulous, distaff cover version of Nazareth’s deathless 1970s power ballad Love Hurts. It’s a choice that seemingly signals a certain ironic, post-modern distance from the material, but the most compelling thing about Strange Darling is the tension between pastiche and sincerity that inflects every sadistic set piece and wild plot twist. A true-crime style voice over cues us to believe (or not) that the action has a stranger-than-fiction basis, and that we’re watching a dramatisation of the final days of a notorious American serial killer. The fact that Fitzgerald’s flannel-clad pursuer (Kyle Gallner) is referred to in the opening credits as ‘the Demon’ keys us to believe he’s the star attraction, but a series of time-shifting cutaway complicates our understanding of his character and performance, to say nothing of his co-star, whose work here is nothing short of a tour de-force.

If this all sounds a bit vague or evasive, that’s because Mollner has found a way to turn evasive vagueness into an aesthetic – one lubricated by plenty of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as well as bursts of brutal violence a few degrees queasier (and sleazier) than the post-Tarantino norm. To give the director his due, he’s nothing if not up front about his tactics, burying conceptual clues in every corner of his candy-coloured frames (lensed by actor Giovanni Ribisi) and daring us to keep track. 

Such deconstructivist impulses are all the rage these days among ambitious genre specialists (see also this year’s In a Violent Nature) but the funny gamesmanhip eventually gets wearying, especially once the film has showed its hand as basically an elongated gotcha joke. Then there’s the fact that the shell-game nature of Mollner’s storytelling serves primarily as a misdirection from some ugly and troubling subtext – ideas that actually seem that much more rancid for being artfully disguised instead of served straight up. Between its energetic low-budget engineering and superbly modulated lead performances, there’s no denying that Strange Darling is an accomplished piece of work; the question of what it actually accomplishes, meanwhile, remains open. 

 ► Strange Darling arrives in UK cinemas 20 September.