[Film Review] Strange Darling (2023) and Motel Destino (2024)

Title: Strange Darling

Year: 2023

Genre: Thriller

Country: USA

Language: English

Director/Screenwriter: JT Mollner

Music: Craig DeLeon

Cinematography: Giovanni Ribisi

Editor: Christopher Robin Bell

Cast:

Willa Fitzgerald

Kyle Gallner

Barbara Hershey

Ed Begley Jr.

Madisen Beaty

Steven Michael Quezada

Bianca A. Santos

Denise Grayson

Sheri Foster

Rating: 7.8/10

Title: Motel Destino

Year: 2024

Genre: Thriller

Country: Brazil, France, Germany, UK

Language: Portuguese

Director: Karim Aïnouz

Screenwriters: Wilson Esmeraldo, Karim Aïnouz, Mauricio Zacharias

Music: Amin Bouhafa

Cinematography: Hélène Louvart

Editor: Nelly Quettier

Cast:

Iago Xavier

Nataly Rocha

Fábio Assunção

Renan Capivara

Fabiola Liper

Yuri Yamamoto

Isabela Catão

David Santos

Rating: 6.3/10

A brace of erotic thrillers attempts to add new spins to the genre's time-honored conventions, with varied results. JT Mollner's second feature STRANGE DARLING deceptively draws on audience's preconceptions and then cinches a subversive about-face to the serial-killer/slasher blueprint. Meantime, Brazilian veteran filmmaker Karim Aïnouz's latest Palme d'or entrant is a neon-soaked eternal triangle paying homage to James M. Cain's seminal 1934 crime novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice", a South American iteration set in a horny, sultry sex hotel.

STRANGE DARLING’s opening caption informs us it is a story about a notorious serial killer’s last kill. "A thriller of six chapters” is the subheading under its title card. But the film purposely disrupts the linear narrative, starting in medias res from chapter 3, jumping to 5, going back to 1, then crisscrossing to 4, 2, until 6 the finale, suffixed with an epilogue. This ostensibly random design is at first perplexing, but in hindsight, it is an ingenious move to knock audience dead with its gender-switch twist.

Chapter 3 is a white-knuckle car chasing segueing into a verdantly sylvan hide-and-seek, which resembles a standard cat-and-mouse death hunt between a menacing, gun-toting man, aka. the Demon (Gallner) and an unarmed but ballsy woman, the Lady (Fitzgerald), a specimen of the final girl. Chapter 5 ends with the Demon finally catching up with the Lady, hiding inside an empty freezer of an elderly couple’s digs. Then Chapter 1 rewinds back to reveal that they are initially two strangers agreeing on a one night stand and the Lady shows a bent for sadomasochistic role play. She even asks him whether he is a serial killer, and forcing a halting “no” out of him before proceeding with their fling, knocking out of the park“the danger of a girl just wants to have some fun”.

So from the foregoing three chapters, audience takes it for granted that the Demon is the killer and the Lady is his prey. Only in Chapter 4, the sudden dispatch of one half of the elderly couple (the scene is carried out with a muted casualness, courtesy to Mollner’s unshowy execution and Hershey’s believably stunned reactions) that jolts audience to think twice about the Lady’s hellbent refusal to call the police. In Chapter 2, Mollner finally tips his hand to demonstrate what makes the Demon wants to gun down the Lady. It is very personal. The finale between the two is somewhat a letdown compared to all the preceding thrills and chills. The Lady’s table-turning attack is too obvious to be surprising with her hands conspicuously concealed from the frame for far too long. But it is the foolishness of a female policewoman (Beaty) that clicks with audience for the film's acerbic mockery of a do-gooder hoodwinked by gender conformations. Ironically, it is she, not her wiser black male partner (Quezada), whose life is spared.

Mollner’s wily attack on gendered conventions reaches its cadenza in the epilogue. Who can argue a seemingly innocuous, obliging native Indian woman (Foster) could be quicker on the draw than a disguised spree killer, and who doesn’t have a gun with them in the land of freedom? (Except for two happily retired mountain hippies, apparently!) Two bedfellows, guns and drugs, with no leashes on them, are the undoing of any number of modern society, mark my words.

Besides Mollner’s inventive diegesis and actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi’s strikingly expressive chromatic affinities, the film’s success lives and dies with the two leading performances. Gallner, further refining his bad guy éclat and pizzazz, is a walking hormone brimming with danger and libido. But the real coup here is Fitzgerald, multifaceted and multilayered as the Lady’s identity shifting from a victim to a victimizer, a cunning manipulator, a cold-blooded psychopath and a self-destructive monster. The Lady’s final discoloring long-take alone could put Fitzgerald’s name on any list of year-best performances, where she marvelously displays the moribund course of kicking up the bucket, and life literally gets sucked out of her eyes.

STRANGE DARLING's retro snuff movie mouthfeel can also be tasted in MOTEL DESTINO. Compelled to lie low after his own absence causing his brother being killed during a hit, a 21-year-old Heraldo (Xavier) hides in a roadside motel operated by Elias (Assunção) and his wife Dayana (Rocha).

Shot in Ceará, the Northeastern state of Brazil, MOTEL DESTINO is drenched in an over-saturation of fluorescent, rich colors, like the carmine or ultramarine interior of the motel, where lust, disinhibition, voyeurism and mistrust roil in the dark corridors and corners. Heraldo's tryst with Dayana is justified by the latter's mistreatment at the hands of a testy Elias (which is presented not as obnoxious as one might speculate). But unlike a traditional heteronormative love triangle, Elias, whose penchant for tank-tops or posturing naked above the waist, betrays a none-too-subtle homoerotic hankering for Heraldo, whose swarthy, ephebe-like vigor and potency seems hard to resist for both him and Dayana. Only the catch is, Heraldo is straight as an arrow, a forced man-on-man kiss is all Elias could exact out of a recalcitrant, guarded, unregenerate Heraldo, like a bulldog whose bark is worse than his bite.

However, Heraldo and Dayana's half-baked plan to rub off Elias is disproportionate to the latter's own outrageous possessiveness and ego, not to mention his inclination to shuck off unwanted corpses in the empty beach. So it is actually Heraldo and Dayana's lives are on the line when their affair is exposed. As the story winds up, it is due to sheer luck, that the pair is miraculously out of harm's way, in their birthday suits.

This tropical noir is audacious to get its characters rocks off, but Aïnouz feels slack in juicing up Heraldo and Dayana's story arc. For example, the former's mounting guilt is wonderfully dissipated as, again, luck has done him the necessary vengeance, and newcomer Xavier is too green to register aggrieved anger in the crucially emotive moment when he endeavors to get it off his chest. Moreover, Rocha's Dayana is diminished to a cypher without much agency save her sex drive. All that leaves an imposing Assunção to turn heads with his mesmeric attitudinizing as an alpha male humanized by his heterodox sexuality, his struggling to come to terms with it (or consummate it) and his ultimate disillusionment. When all is said and done, audience may feel sorry for him, he is another unlucky soul entrapped by his own murky desire, which actually dulls the edge of the triumph for the adultery-committing survivors.

Confined in claustrophobic space with ultra-intense hues and throbbing soundtracks, Aïnouz's film is a botched undertaking to revivify a familiar template with a soupçon of queerness, since it dithers around the issue with much suspense and intrigue withering as the narrative meanders. With an effete peacher in the fold (Yamamoto's Môco, an unabashed presence of self-confidence and coded agency), MOTEL DESTINO falls short of taking the plunge to be edgier and more transgressive, and Aïnouz's perceptiveness is also, regrettably, lost in the shuffle.

referential entries: Carter Smith’s THE PASSENGER (2023, 6.8/10); Aïnouz's INVISIBLE LIFE (2019, 7.9/10); Tay Garnett's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946, 6.4/10).