Love does indeed hurt but there is none to be
found within this film
dir: JT Mollner
2024
This flick thinks it’s ever so fucking clever.
I beg to disagree.
It starts with a pseudo-voice-over meant to sound like what it’s saying is true. I don’t know if it’s cribbing from the most famous of the fake intros ever done, which is probably the infamous one John Larroquette recorded for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s another reminder of how artificial this all is.
It’s not based on a true story, but it does clue us in to a detail about these shenanigans being something to do with some killing spree from some serial killer.
A-HA! It must be the first guy we see on the screen, helpfully titled The Demon. He does have a moustache after all. We also hear a voice ask him if he’s a serial killer, and then he’s shown doing something murdery!
But then… we’re told that this is a story that will be told in six parts. And then the film ‘jumps’ to part 3.
Hmm, this is gonna be one of dem dere non-chronological storytellings, huh?
And to what purpose will that non-chronological telling be? Is it to delightfully obscure what is happening and why, or is it to deepen our understanding of the rich tapestry of life that we call the human experience?
Yeah Nah. It’s just to delay our understanding of what’s really going on.
This is a strange thriller that seems to be trading on our expectations of what “should” happen in a flick like this, but if it did, we’d just be bored. Instead it pretends to upend everything by having the killer not be the one we expect, but then having that killer do determinedly dumber things as the movie progresses.
In ‘edgy’ movies, like maybe this and the recent French mindless shocker Titane, there will often be a killer who just kills in order to kill. It’s not even that they delight in slaughter like some Jokeresque mass murdering lunatic, or that they need to in order to survive: They just mindlessly, stupidly keep slaughtering away even if it isn’t in their best interest, even if it’s not helpful. I find it particularly distasteful not because of the ethical or moral implications, and not even on an aesthetic level. It bugs me fundamentally because it amuses the filmmakers to just have it cascade along as more innocent people are slaughtered, and yet it in no way means the protagonist / antagonist is increasing their level of peril or the tension in the film. Sure, you just tortured someone in a hotel room for about half an hour, and then randomly killed someone at a hotel, and maybe some passers-by, but the cops won’t turn up until it’s very, very convenient.
At best it makes me roll my eyes. At best.
You might read in reviews or critiques that this film upends ideas about tensions between men and women, the environment that dating occurs in these days, the dangers involved in random hook-ups, people being into extreme sadomasochistic stuff etc. I think it’s all bullshit. The least convincing scenes in the flick are when people are talking. The most convincing scenes are when people are running, or trying to hide.
Almost everything else occurs for what I should hesitate to call “dumb” reasons, but won’t, because there’s an air of ‘whatever’ that permeates everything this protagonist does that doesn’t really work for me. It would work in a comedy. I don’t think this is a comedy.
There are two main characters. A guy (Kyle Gallner), who may just be a guy, but he may be a demon. There’s a lady (Willa Fitzgerald). There’s a couple at an isolated farmhouse (Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jnr, and both are delightful, and the best and only good part of the movie). There are a few other characters, but their purpose is just to die.
This is a flick that works best only when you consider that the makers (in which I mean the director and the cinematographer, who happens to be oddball actor Giovanni Ribisi) do their darndest to capture exactly the images and sequences they want without wondering why they should matter (to us).
It’s a shame they couldn’t find a compelling way to connect those images to each other in a cohesive story.
I don’t have much of a problem with nonlinear storytelling. Used effectively it can be magnificent. Used poorly it can be just stultifyingly dull, like almost every time that Guy Ritchie uses it. Its laziest use shames both the filmmakers and the audience watching.
The only reason the movie is told non-chronologically is to delay the obvious, and it is really fucking obvious. So they show us a couple of images out of context, and then tell the story from Chapters 3 to 5, then 1, 4 then 2, and then the pointless Epilogue. If you show something right at the start, and then almost immediately subvert it, there’s no twist. That’s neither twist nor revelation nor anything that interesting. One of these two people is a serial killer. You’ll probably never have any difficulty guessing which one.
There’s no twist. Anyone who hasn’t already worked out who the killer is just from the name and the context hasn’t watched any movies before.
Making things even worse or lazier, the dreaded name of Tarantino keeps being mentioned in context of anything being told in a nonlinear fashion, and I hate to be put in the position of defending Tarantino, but he would never have put out a flick with dialogue as limp and lifeless as this, nor would he have had performances this random.
Also, he didn’t invent nonlinear storytelling, nor did he perfect it, nor does he get a cut every time someone brings his name up pointlessly. So we should just stop now.
It’s hard for me to say whether the performances are decent or not. They’re probably appropriate to the ham-fisted story delivery. Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald are fine, I guess. The flick doesn’t give them the scope it pretends it does just from having our expectations upended back and forth a few times, at least in that they can’t be blamed. It’s just, yikes, the dumb things the flick has them do in order to get where it wants to go, goddamn, I laughed, but not in a way complimentary to what I was watching.
Rather than being in any way illuminating or interesting, I found the sadomasochistic roleplaying stuff excruciatingly awful, and I wanted, really deeply wanted all talking to end and things to explode so I wouldn’t have to hear these people talking ever again.
The killer is just such a fuckwit about things that, honestly, anything being said which pretends to be anything deeper is lost in the noise of this flicks conviction that it’s in any way saying anything meaningful is ludicrous. The last minutes of the flick involve this stupid serial killer trying to kill yet another person unnecessarily, for no reason, which results in what it results in, and I just remembered thinking not “wow, what a cool and edgy way to end things”, but instead “the fuck was the point of all that?”
I didn’t enjoy this flick, even if it has some interesting images. The experience of watching it was unpleasant, and the overall takeaway was that I’d wasted an hour and thirty seven minutes of my life that I could have otherwise spent watching Slow Horses, which is at least entertaining.
5 times yes I did turn this review into a recommendation for Slow Horses, and it’s not because I’m looking and acting more and more like Jackson Lamb every day out of 10
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“Are you a serial killer?” – these days, what American isn’t? - Strange Darling
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