There are films you enjoy, films you admire, and then films that bypass your intellect entirely and go straight for the nervous system. Strange Darling did that to me. I didn’t just watch it - I felt located by it.
From the title alone, the film announces its intelligence. Strange Darling sounds intimate and threatening in the same breath, and the opening scene honours that tension immediately. The colour blocking is not aesthetic flourish but psychological architecture. The cinematography is precise, deliberate, almost mannered - yet constantly vibrating with danger.
The chemistry between the leads is undeniable and unsettling. Not romantic, not safe - a charge that feels ferocious without tipping into fantasy. They are both extraordinarily talented and undeniably hot, which matters because attraction interferes with moral clarity. The film understands that beauty disarms suspicion and uses it without apology. Watching them together is confronting, hypnotic, and hard to look away from.
The sequencing fractures time just enough to destabilise meaning. I wasn’t consuming a story, I was actively reassembling one, constantly revising my assumptions. The brilliance is that the film isn’t interested in resolution so much as aftermath. It lingers where most thrillers cut away. It trusts the audience. To sit in discomfort.
The lead character felt both familiar and free to me. I live with cptsd, which means my system is always scanning - forecasting outcomes, rehearsing consequences, tracking tone and threat. I am rarely just in a moment. She is unburdened by anticipatory guilt. No forecasting. No moral accounting in advance. No “what if this ruins everything?” Just impulse → discharge → aftermath.
That sequence is deeply my Aries nature - it’s my instinctive wiring - but trauma has placed a governor on it. So what I felt watching her wasn’t aspiration. It was contrast. The relief of imagining what it might feel like to turn the watchtower off.
She isn’t calculated. She isn’t a strategist or a mastermind. She isn’t even consistently predatory. She is reactive. State-driven. Her nervous system cascades: threat appears and survival fires; arousal spikes into something feral; loneliness surfaces and seeks connection through distortion. She isn’t choosing violence as an identity. She’s responding to overwhelming internal states without a regulatory brake.
That distinction matters to me. Especially when it comes to intimacy. Her sexuality is crude and maladaptive, but it reads as an attempt to connect rather than to dominate. That recognition was uncomfortable and clarifying. It forced me to be honest about why I enjoy violence during sex - not as cruelty, but as a controlled place where intensity, power, and closeness are negotiated rather than feared.
Then there's the layer I understand through Motherhood. I witness my child flip from silly to screeching inside a second. I recognise the primitive brain intimately. Through that lens, my own mother finally made sense - her childlike dysregulation, her volatility. The difference is that I was never allowed the same collapse. My infant and adolescent dysregulation was punished. Hers filled the room. Seeing that mirrored in an adult body on screen was shocking.
There is joy in the fantasy of dropping the watchtower, and sadness in knowing why I can’t. The character’s undomesticated energy feels wild and alive, but also lonely and destructive, instinct moving without containment. It echoed Women Who Run With the Wolves, not in its romance of instinct, but in its insistence that the feminine psyche holds forces that demand acknowledgement, not repression.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés frames these forces as medicines - psychic remedies that awaken dormant aspects of the self. In that sense, Strange Darling felt like an accidental initiation. Baba Yaga appears not as a villain but as a threshold guardian: the terrifying wild mother who strips illusion and demands maturity. She does not comfort; she teaches through ordeal. The lead character feels Baba Yaga–touched, operating beyond social permission, forcing confrontation with what happens when instinct is unleashed without wisdom.
La Loba, the Wolf Woman, gathers bones from the desert and sings them back to life. This is the psychic archaeology of trauma: retrieving what was buried to survive. I felt that in the film’s aftermath, the sense that something skeletal had been unearthed in me. Not revived fully, but recognised. Bluebeard, too, hovered in the background: the internal predator that kills curiosity and punishes transgression. In my own life, that voice learned its script early, obedience as safety, self-surveillance as survival. The lead character exists beyond Bluebeard’s rules, but at a cost.
What Strange Darling stirred in me was not a desire to become uncontained, but a reckoning with how much energy it takes to remain regulated. And what happens when instinct is unleashed without wisdom.
I watched Strange Darling beside someone I’m getting to know - someone who meets me intellectually and emotionally - which made the experience feel unexpectedly exposed. To be seen while responding honestly - disturbed, aroused, thoughtful, mattered. The film didn’t just raise questions about violence and agency. It asked how we read each other, how quickly we assign narratives, and what happens when regulation fails and no one is steering.
People don’t become dangerous because they want to be monsters. They become dangerous when regulation collapses. Strange Darling doesn’t excuse that truth. It simply refuses to sanitise it.