Writer-director JT Mollner‘s “Strange Darling” is one of the best American genre films in years, an electrifying thriller that’s in the same league as John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple,” and Quentin Tarantino‘s “Reservoir Dogs” when it comes to reinventing old traditions and making them feel startlingly new again. It’s a film best entered cold, since its surprises — of which there are many — are among its greatest pleasures, but it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the movie takes the “final girl” convention of slasher films like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Friday the 13th” and breathes exhilarating new life into it.
“I was like, what can we do with the final girl that gives her more depth?” Mollner told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “That peels layers of her psyche away and shows us something more? I started getting really interested in archetypes from my favorite genre films, movies like “Duel.” I didn’t want to do a traditional serial killer movie, even though I love those movies, just like I don’t want to make a gangster movie because ‘Goodfellas’ is already out there, right?”
Mollner found that the key was beginning his movie where most other horror movies end, with the image of the final girl running through the forest away from her killer. From there he put the story together out of order, so that when the audience experiences it it’s in chapters shuffled out of chronology. “I knew that if we put those scenes in order, the characters were compelling enough, but narratively it was boring and conventional,” Mollner said. “The story was all about the shuffling of those chapters and the discovery, and it was always very deliberate.”
When asked if he ever assembled the film in order just for fun Mollner says he didn’t, but someone else did — and without his participation — during the post-production process. “It’s funny, when I pitched the movie in the beginning everybody liked the nonlinear structure, and we got the green light with that structure,” Mollner said. “But once we had a director’s cut and turned it in, there were a couple people at the studio who were distrustful of the form. They thought it was confusing and that audiences weren’t going to understand it, and they thought they were trying to protect the movie — they were trying to protect me.”
Mollner didn’t have final cut on “Strange Darling,” and even though he felt people would have no problem understanding it he agreed to be a team player when executives said they wanted to put the film in order and see how it played. “I watched both versions, and of course, it turned out how I thought it would,” Mollner said. “It was unwatchable to me. It was boring. Luckily, we tested the nonlinear version, and nobody in the audience had any problems following it.” After that, the financiers gave Mollner final cut, and he was able to finish the movie his way. “For better or worse, the movie you saw is the movie I wanted you to see.”
That movie, in addition to all its other strengths, is visually stunning thanks to the work of cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, who is best known as an actor but makes a spectacular feature debut as director of photography on “Strange Darling.” Mollner first met Ribisi at an American Society of Cinematographers awards dinner, where he asked Ribisi to act in one of his films and was surprised by Ribisi’s answer.
“He was like, ‘You know what? What I’m really interested in is shooting movies,’” Mollner said. Ribisi showed Mollner the studio he had built, and the two filmmakers bonded over their mutual devotion to celluloid, and before long, they were introducing each other to the filmmakers that excited them. By the time they got to “Strange Darling,” they had a shared vocabulary that allowed them to create meticulous, textured 35mm images on a tight budget and schedule — although theirs was a typically chaotic and difficult independent film shoot, the movie never appears to be straining against its resources.
Together, Ribisi and Mollner crafted a look that yields maximum emotional impact via an expressive use of color reminiscent of films like Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers.” “I used to be really interested in realism,” Mollner said. “Now I’m just interested in expressing how I’m feeling at the time I’m making the movie, and Giovanni was really turned on by that as well.” Because Ribisi owns so much of his own equipment, he and Mollner were able to prepare with a level of care that is rare for an independent movie.
“We were able to do the amount of tests that Scorsese was probably able to do in the months prior to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’” Mollner said. “That is not normally what you get on smaller films like ours. You normally get two days at Panavision or something, and that’s it. We spent weeks shot listing the film, which is how I love to work, and I was really happy that he loved to work that way too. And then of course you get into production and you have to bob and weave and pivot, but we really planned the movie meticulously and didn’t overshoot. And I’m very proud of what we did.”
