J.T. Mollner
Strange Darling

How much can we trust our perceptions?

The film begins with a setting stolen from a “Quiet Weekend of Fear.”

In the wild heart of Oregon, an injured woman desperately tries to escape an unrelenting predator. With every passing minute, her strength wanes, while the man chasing her seems to have a precise mission: to capture her. Cinematic memory, memory itself, perception, can be deceived—it will be discovered a little further on that this is the point. But are we sure who the prey really is? And who the hunter?

Directed by J.T. Mollner, Strange Darling is a psychological thriller developed in six chapters told randomly, in an attempt to overturn the logical connection with which we are accustomed to interpreting this genre of film. What begins as a chance encounter between two strangers quickly transforms into a nightmare, where nothing is as it seems. The tension grows as past and present intertwine in a psychological hall of mirrors, leaving open a disturbing question: how much can we trust our perceptions?

The six non-sequential chapters are Mollner’s artifice to implode the filmic structure and accommodate the director’s desire to overturn the preset rhythm and let go of the random beating of time, panting and individualistic. Logic is overwhelmed by emotion and abandons the conformity of the chronological passage of time.

In the silent heart of Oregon, among the motionless fronds and deserted roads beaten only by the wind and guilt, two figures move: him and her.

Lady and Demon. But it’s not Disneyland.

Two archetypes, two entities moving within that narrative space where the perpetrator and the victim cease to be fixed roles and become interchangeable masks. Dostoevsky would have smiled observing this ambiguous dynamic: who is the guilty one, when innocence itself becomes suspect? And Thomas De Quincey, the celebrator of murder, would have found here a work worthy of his disturbing praise.

The film plays on our habits, our classifications, our archived files, on symmetries and inversions. Every gesture, every look, every breath between the two protagonists is charged with unspeakable tension. It is not just a thriller veiled with ambiguity; there is an attempt to enrich modernity with ancient aspects, although the experience may not seem entirely successful, with echoes of classical tragedy in a Tarantino-esque style. In Lady, one can glimpse, albeit from afar, the shadows of Byronic heroines, marked by an enchanted beauty and unconfessed pain. In Demon, there is the distant echo of a contemporary Mephistopheles, but less lucid, more animalistic, driven by a blind urge for destruction.

But what makes Strange Darling slightly more unsettling than the flatness of contemporary thrillers is the way the narrative dismantles the very idea of predator and prey. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, evil is not outside but within; it does not have a specific face but dwells in the folds of intimacy, hiding in the most everyday details. As Patricia Highsmith wrote, “nothing is more unsettling than discovering the normality of evil.” Strange Darling does all of this, but not in a natural way, following a true logic of the normality of evil, perhaps driven by a sense of snobbery and nonconformity with the current and predictable cinematic productions on the subject.

Here, nature also becomes a character. It is not a mere background but a distorting mirror of the psyche. The woods, abandoned roads, creaking wooden shacks: everything participates in the drama, everything observes, immobile, the decay of two souls already in a state of dissolution. The entire setting is filled with that Gothic sublime found in Ann Radcliffe’s novels or Shirley Jackson’s hallucinatory visions. Perhaps it is by chance or coincidence, but I believe this is one of the few truly fascinating aspects of the film.

Ultimately, the violence itself is never displayed as an end in itself but becomes a language, a symptom, a distorted dream. The film's six decomposed chapters do not confuse but guide like an initiation ritual. Like being kidnapped and blindfolded, dragged to a mysterious place: it’s a shame that when the blindfold is removed, the sense of fiction is even stronger and more tangible than before. They do not want to explain; they want to destabilize. It is the trauma that dictates the editing.

And so, when the film concludes, there is no sense of closure but an open wound. There is no catharsis. Evil is neither defeated nor glorified. It is merely recognized. As something that is part of the very fabric of human experience. The idea is good at its core, but the application remains latent.