Spoiler warning: there are spoilers for both films in this piece.
Women in horror spin delicious webs. Complex renderings of rage, grief, and madness require astute interpretations of the material. Whether it’s Simon Simone coloring Irena with suffocating loneliness in Cat People (1942) or Rebecca Hall drowning Beth in wine and sorrow in The Night House (2020), women frequently tap into primal instinct and guttural play to transmit their stories of heartbreak, misery, and bloodthirsty glee. Barbaric conditions push them to the edge, the cliff dropping down and away from their feet. Women teeter there on the brink, and all they can do is scream. With J.T. Mollner’s Strange Darling and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, two women carve beating hearts from their chests and take a juicy bite. Sticky blackness oozes from pulsating veins, their bloodlust irresistible. Their murderous motives sprout from very different places, yet they’re cut from the same cloth: a woman’s fury.
The Electric Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), incensed by bad men’s behavior, flips the script on the public perception of men vs. women. She conceals herself behind these stone-walled standards, slyly retooling the “damsel in distress” trope as a conduit to her murderous impulses. Her predilection for carving EL into limp bodies of men (after she’s drugged them with ketamine, leaving them completely incapacitated) symbolizes her dominion over the male form. Mollner writes in abstracts, of course, never revealing these texts and keeping them simmering just below the surface. Sometimes, it’s what you don’t know that kills you.
‘Strange Darling’
The antithesis emerges in Kyle Gallner’s The Demon. He’s a straight white man (and a cop, no less), so he must be evil. When we first meet him, he’s chasing down The Electric Lady in Chapter 3 – the non-linear storytelling leads the audience to trip over their own biases. He wears red flannel and carries a shotgun. His vintage, yellow-tinted aviators trick you into thinking he’s some perverse serial killer from the 1970s. Minor details swallow any notion that you could be wrong about what you’re witnessing.
Catching you mid-story, Mollner suckers you into his delicately-built web with a fisherman’s lure. While you settle into expectation, he keeps you on the hook just long enough to subvert your preconceived ideas. The man in this story is a deeply tragic human being; he’s not a good guy. He’s a cheater, and there are indications he harbors a history of drug abuse. As initially perceived by the audience, his rage stems from a hatred of women, like a scorned lover who lacks the capability of expressing his feelings in a non-violent way. The use of “here, kitty kitty kitty” (as he toys with his prey) leans further into ultra-violent, misogynistic violence – a disturbing admission that bolsters Mollner’s playful, sneaky gambit.
When the switch happens, as Mollner continues rearranging the timeline, it’s not only a well-earned plot device but also shatters the audience’s perceptions. It challenges harmful assumptions about gender, twisting the knife ever so slightly to force viewers to confront their inherent prejudices. Fitzgerald and Gallner commit to the game brilliantly – turning in performances that shock and pulverize.
Fitzgerald’s performance, especially, delivers on feminine wrath. She flicks through various emotional channels – from the seething rage of Kill Bill to the throbbing fear of your classic revenge thriller (think: Ms .45 or Revenge). As the story comes to a volcanic conclusion, The Electric Lady has left a trail of bodies in her wake, some collateral damage, and others carcasses shredded and dripping with mutilated flesh. Fitzgerald ties a neat little bow to Strange Darling’s thesis about powerful, complicated women daring to climb down into the snake pit. Women are allowed to be villains, and when you have someone like Willa Fitzgerald guiding the narrative, clear lines are drawn about the complexities of womanhood, how women move in the world, and the rotted indulgences of men. It might not have your typical Good for Her energy (like the other film discussed below), but it suggests that empathy is not an unfounded emotion to experience with the story. Human beings are complex creatures, and no one would fault you if you rooted for The Electric Lady to get away with her crimes.
‘Last Night in Soho’
That’s certainly the feeling pounding like an alarm inside Last Night in Soho, as well. Sandy, or Alexandra Collins (Diana Rigg), as we come to know, kills men. It’s not a sporting event for her but rather an escape from her life. In the 1960s, she took to London with great aspirations to become a superstar, hitting up various music venues, such as Café de Paris, with the hope of busting down the doors. Instead of experiencing her big break, she becomes entranced by the self-proclaimed “manager” of young women and pushed into a life of exploitation and sex work. It’s not the existence she would have chosen for herself, and for a time, she resigns herself to her station of charming old white men.
Time takes its toll on her mental state, and she soon snaps. She realizes that there’s only one way out of this life: murder. So, she murders men after she takes them back to her upstairs apartment and seduces them. When they’re in their most vulnerable state – and there’s nothing more vulnerable and raw than sex – she brandishes a glistening kitchen knife and slices into their jaws. Blood splatters everywhere. Once the deed has been done, she stows their limp corpses inside her home’s walls and underneath the floorboards. She compartamentlizes her crimes, justifying them as much-deserved comeuppance. They deserved it (and worse), she tells herself. Sandy unlocks great agency through her bloodlust. She becomes insatiable, reconciling her actions and believing she’s doing good work.
We see the past through Ellie’s (Thomasin McKenzie) eyes. After she leaves her small country village, she attends a fashion school in the heart of north London. She’s ambitious to a fault, if perhaps a little naive. When she realizes her roommate Jacosta (Synnøve Karlsen) is the literal worst, she rents a bedsit and moves into the same bedroom Sandy once killed those men all those decades ago. When she goes to sleep at night, Ellie falls into a dazzling wonderland of late ‘60s glamour. The lights sparkle in her eyes. She’s hypnotized with the vintage fashion, the music, and the entire Giallo-like aesthetic. Wright douses the audience in that world, a fully-body immersion that feels ripped from the Dario Argento or Mario Bava playbook.
Ellie begins to welcome her fantastical slumbers. She brushes off John’s (Michael Ajao) requests to hang out in favor of delving deeper into Sandy’s seemingly exciting life. But the paint starts to peel, and she soon plummets into the dark, slimy underbelly of the entertainment world, just as Sandy loses herself and falls prey to treacherous men. In one of her dreamy visions, Ellie witnesses Sandy’s murder, which couldn’t be further from the actual truth, and makes it her life mission to solve the “missing persons” case. While moonlighting as a bartender, she assumes one of her frequent male patrons has ulterior motives and knows much more about the late ‘60s murders than he lets on. She confronts him on the street, and in a shocking twist, he’s knocked on his back by an oncoming car. He wasn’t Sandy’s murderer after all, but instead the cop who investigated the murders, as revealed by Sandy’s pub boss.
‘Last Night in Soho’
The past and present collide in the third act when Ellie learns the harrowing truth. Setting her sights on fleeing London for good, she returns to her apartment and breaks the news to Ms. Collins, who drugs her tea with the full intent of killing her. In the film’s jaw-dropping scene, Ms. Collins reveals she is, in fact, the cursed Sandy from the 1960s and that she’s been killing men in retribution. It’s a real Good for Her revelation – perhaps murder is an extreme reaction, but when you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, you’ll do almost anything to breathe again.
Ellie is aghast but quickly succumbs to the poison now flowing in her system, eventually crawling her way to the staircase. Sandy swipes her kitchen knife in her direction and forces Ellie up the stairs into the apartment. The tortured spirits of all the dead men appear but cower in Sandy’s presence. As police lights swirl in the window, Sandy makes a deadly choice. She refuses to go to prison, so she digs the blade into her neck. She’s finally, truly free from the men who’ve damaged her life, free from the weight of her crimes, and free to exist unencumbered in a celestial plane somewhere in the afterlife.
Sandy’s tragic existence feels authentically yanked from real life. She’s a complicated anti-hero; perhaps there’s no justification for her murder spree – and yet the blame rightly sits with the many men who manipulated and abused her. She sacrificed herself – even the present Sandy admits that she did die in that upstairs bedoom… in a way. Parts of herself disappeared every single time she took a man’s hand and led him up the creaky front stairs. Her womanhood became a lamb to the slaughter, put upon the patriarchal altar for all to consume. Her agency in killing was her way of shattering the glass ceiling and detonating the misogynistic system. None of those men would ever be able to hurt another woman ever again… and in that way, Last Night in Soho features a triumphant ending. Sandy might be dead, but her memory lives on through Ellie.
With complex, deepy flawed women at their center, Last Night in Soho and Strange Darling make poignant statements about gender assumptions, agency, and tearing down patriarchal traditions. It’s filtered through a murderous lens, of course – I mean, they are horror movies after all – so moral lines are blurred, and viewers must reevaluate their own roles in and presumptions about these systems.
At the end of the day, Edgar Wright’s and JT Mollner’s films make one helluva double feature. Do yourself a favor and revel in their stories; you just might be surprised by what you discover.
Double Trouble is a recurring column that pairs up two horror films, past or present, based on theme, style, or story.
The post A Woman’s Fury: ‘Strange Darling’ & ‘Last Night in Soho’ [Double Trouble] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
