In the Flesh: Strange Darling

J. T. Mollner’s Strange Darling opens on a protracted monologue straight out of a Feminism 101 pamphlet, with the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) explaining to the Demon (Kyle Gallner) that women take their lives in their hands with every hookup. Neither Fitzgerald nor Gallner does bad work, exactly, but the hamfisted gee-whiz tone of their back and forth suggests some kind of satirical edge that never really comes. Even as the film’s twisty back-and-forth timeline reveals the reversed gender dynamics at play, there’s nothing under that initial monologue to substantively complicate it, and nothing in Fitzgerald’s performance to suggest anything but rote villainy at play behind her cynical exploitation of gender norms to prey on unsuspecting men and evade justice. It’s not that it’s wrong to make art about a woman raping male victims and taking advantage of societal prejudices to get away with it, it’s that Strange Darling makes it boring. It simply has nothing to say about such an intensely sticky and difficult intersection of issues.

Then there’s the structure, a kind of shell game the film employs to obfuscate its essential emptiness. Aside from the central twist, that Lady and not Demon is the monster, you have a few moments of fairly standard BDSM rape fantasy stuff presented as menacing and real balanced against cuts back to the characters negotiating the scenes ahead of time. The fantasy is the reality is the fantasy. Before you’ve even seen it, the bit’s grown old. Then the movie does it about four more times. Why, when it’s already tipped its hand? I honestly couldn’t tell you. Just for structural symmetry’s sake, I guess. The end result is a flick that at an hour and forty minutes feels overlong by about fifty, its wad shot before the handcuffs are even on. It’s fine to look at. Basically unobjectionable. The score isn’t anything to write home about, and God knows the dialogue is tin-eared. 

Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey are fun as the lovingly quarrelsome old hippy couple who unknowingly let the murderous Lady into their remote home as she flees from Demon, and it’s nice to see Breaking Bad’s perennially underappreciated Stephen Michael Quezada getting work, even if it’s a thankless bit part as the cop who wants to go by the book and leave a bleeding woman handcuffed to a meat freezer while they wait for an ambulance, but with totally untextured leads there just isn’t much happening here, and certainly nothing that dozens of other films haven’t already done smarter and better. If it weren’t for its much-ballyhooed structure, I doubt anyone would have given this stinker a second look.