What’s Strange Darling about? To know, it seems, would take away the suspense and presumably, some of the terror of watching it. The synopsis gives little away, merely stating that “nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer’s vicious murder spree.”
The trailer gives away a bit more, but not much. We see Willa Fitzgerald (The Goldfinch, Reacher), and a redhead get stuffed into a freezer and run screaming for her life. And we see Kyle Gallner (Smile, Dinner in America) apparently chasing after her with a gun after spending what seems like a romantic night with Fitzgerald’s character. There are also glimpses of Ed Begley Jr. (Better Call Saul, A Mighty Wind) and Barbara Hershey (Black Swan, Insidious), though we don’t get details about who their characters are other than creepy.
We do know that critics have loved Strange Darling (it currently boasts a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score), and that Stephen King called it “a clever masterpiece.” It comes from writer-director JT Mollner.
“Before there was even a script, an image came to me… one that I couldn’t shake: a woman in distress, running through the woods in slow motion,” Mollner said in the film’s production notes. “I heard a specific song (“Love Hurts”), and even had a sense of the exact frame rate, but still had no idea what it all meant. It felt like a narrative trope all too familiar, but finally it came into focus and I saw a unique opportunity to present the conventional ‘final girl,’ and the conventional evil that pursued her, in a very unconventional way.”
You can see the unconventional way the story plays out when Strange Darling premieres in theaters on August 23, 2024.
Check out its very disturbing trailer below.
