Writer-director JT Mollner shuffles the narrative deck with this macabre, ingenious serial-killer horror whose chapters are shown out of linear order. Each storytelling card is dealt with insolent provocation, a swaggeringly unhelpful contribution to the issues of sexual politics that we see male and female arresting officers debate at the very end. It recalls the look of movies made four or five decades ago; shot on 35mm film by actor turned cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, it is a grisly shocker sporting with misogyny and the final-girl trope. There’s something of Tobe Hooper here, with an eerie “split diopter” camera shot in the manner of Brian De Palma (showing a looming face in closeup and an equally focused figure way behind) and a terrified woman at the wheel of a 1978 Ford Pinto (the car featured in the 1983 Stephen King chiller Cujo).
We begin with some faux-historical background titles about a serial killer who went on a murderous spree across heartland America some years earlier; the killer’s nickname is cheekily withheld. Then we see a grim-faced guy (played by Kyle Gallner) armed with a shotgun, ruthlessly chasing down a terrified victim (Willa Fitzgerald); the hysterical woman seeks shelter at the woodland home of two old hippies played by Ed Begley Jr and Barbara Hershey.
A rewind to an earlier chapter shows that hunter and prey once had a one-night stand, of sorts; he takes her to a hotel and she remarks that she hardly knows him and insouciantly asks if he is a serial killer. On hearing a reassuring answer in the negative, they go ahead with some very dangerous, transgressive sexual role-play, designed to take everyone concerned out of their comfort zone; role-play which with sickening inevitability becomes real, although the narrative disruption obscures the exact moment at which this happens. It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.
• Strange Darling is in UK cinemas from 20 September.
