Written and Directed by JT Mollner | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime

Here’s a throwback to exploitation thrillers of the 1970s, one that undercuts at least one of the violent tropes those movies are built on. A unique marketing hook is its cinematographer — actor Giovanni Ribisi is both producer and director of photography, and he proves himself a talent with lighting and lenses. This is a sharply shot and acted picture, not above indulging in a little ultra-violence while playing with audience expectations.

Strange Darling sets us up with a familiar scenario from a picture of this type — a woman (Willa Fitzgerald, taking a huge bite in this role) in a Ford Pinto (!), bloody and afraid, driving fast on a country road away from a dude (Kyle Gallner) with a rifle in a massive truck. A title card has already told us this picture is based on the last stand of a serial killer. The score is thundering, the editing sharp. She crashes but manages to run off into the woods, the terrifying armed dude with a redneck ‘stache hot on her heels.

But the movie is divided into chapters. This is Chapter Three. We shoot forward to Chapter Five, more bloody carnage in a farmhouse involving an older couple (the always welcome Ed Begley Jr and Barbara Hershey), and then we flip back to Chapter One, the ‘Stache Man and the woman (now in a red wig) he’ll later be trying to murder, in the cab of his truck, negotiating what’s about to happen. Who’s seducing who, and what’s with the erotic games of consent and control going on in a hotel room?

There’s a mordant irony that a more slick, more sophisticated thriller out now, Blink Twice, comes with a trigger warning off the top about its sexual violence and this one, which is more physically explicit, doesn’t.

But then that’s a subversion, too. This is a movie that’s hard to talk about without spoiling, but its non-linear storytelling allows for at least one clever twist in its character motivation. This is a movie made by people who’ve watched a lot of movies — and in that, Strange Darling compares with Tarantino, how the filmmakers are happy to prod at a few culture war hot buttons in order to get a rise while they both indulge in and flip common tropes. There’s no point in taking that bait.

Strange Darling isn’t interested in realism. It’s about genre juice and the landscape of American legend — where men are men and women are women, and many of them carry knives and guns.