You’re not gonna forget this one anytime soon.
The year’s best just-shut-up-and-watch-it movie is Strange Darling (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a wild thriller from writer-director JT Mollner and producer Giovanni Ribisi, who also notches his first feature cinematographer credit. The film has been kicking around for more than a year – it debuted at 2023’s Fantastic Fest – and remained far enough below the radar that its myriad surprises have mostly gone unspoiled. But it was on the radar enough to enjoy significant critical acclaim (95 percent on the Tomatometer), a nearly in-unison chorus that I’m more than happy to join right here and right now.
The Gist: “Are you a serial killer?” A doozy of an opening line, delivered by a character only known as The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), to a man only known as The Demon (Kyle Gallner). This opening scene is actually the middle of the story, so hang on as we jump around: First, to a title card that gives us some lore about a serial killer who slaughtered folks in the Pacific Northwest between 2018 and 2021, a bit framed to make it seem true when it surely isn’t true at all. We see The Lady, wearing bright red nurse’s scrubs, running in slo-mo through the woods, then jump to chapter 3, which shows us how she ended up running in slo-mo through the woods, but not how she ended up in bright red nurse’s scrubs, because that happened in chapter two, which we’ll get to later. The movie will continue in this busted-up manner, but fear not, you’ll understand why soon enough.
There’s not a lot of dialogue here. The Lady is bleeding heavily from her ear, which might not be wholly intact. The Demon pursues her with a deer rifle. Sometimes, they chase each other in vehicles, she in a vintage red Pinto and he in a late-model truck. There are scenes at a home deep in the woods where a weirdo couple (Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr.) lives, aging hippies with, per their radio-listening habits, an interest in sasquatches and UFOs and other hooey. They also prepare and eat a breakfast plate that’s a lot of jelly and butter and eggs and sausages and pancakes and syrup and could be righteously delicious or utterly revolting, who can tell.
