The Camera Never Lies

JT Mollner spills (some of) the beans on his twist-laden horror Strange Darling

- STEVE O'BRIEN

JT MOLLNER REMEMBERS THE day his mind conjured up the image that would kickstart the writing of his second feature film. "I just started to see this woman running through the woods," he says, "being chased by this inescapable evil coming towards her."

It's a classic image from a thousand horror films, but not one that usually opens a movie and that's what makes Strange Darling strikingly different. It's a cat and mouse story told in six chapters, but crucially not in chronological order. It's a puzzle, then, with various twists and turns that make talking about it a difficult thing for the writer/director.

"We had these uncomfortable conversations with distributors where people were like, 'Well, we love it, but the things we love about it we can't really put in the marketing material," Mollner tells Red Alert. "So it's been a delicate dance to make sure that people know there's more to this than just brutality and predation, and all the archetypal tropes that you see in the trailer. Those are in there, but there's more to it than that, without spoiling certain surprises for the audience."