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).
《怪亲》的Chapter 1 mister snuffle中，lady和demon在车中也讨论了男女共处一室这个问题。之后lady逃生中的酒店员工以及女警官，甚至贡献了And just because I have a vagina doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to a fucking thing I have to say的名台词。
除去争议性的情节，导演对于配乐和镜头色彩的运用我个人还是挺中意的。整部电影的配乐充斥着电子乐的轰隆、弦乐的尖锐和轻松美妙的钢琴声，有几场音乐一起来让我仿佛在听《信条》开场的Rainy Night in Tallinn。
汽车正面镜头飞驰而过的紧张，Chapter 4 the mountain people三人组成的诡异杀戮场面，lady藏进冰箱时的镜头推进，非常出色的氛围营造。在Chapter 1 mister snuffle和Chapter 2 do you like a party？中，导演大量使用蓝色和红色的光影，用以塑造两人交心的放松场面和风雨欲来的血腥死亡。特别是lady在厕所中的红色独秀，让我想起《红色房间》通过红色对杀手粉丝的精神进行反映的设计。35mm拍摄的导演骄傲我倒是不怎么get，就像《怖谷鸟》也是35mm又如何，I dont care。
最后要说的，可能有点太靠后了。无论电影怎么样，我都很爱导演所选的歌曲。这些歌曲都由Z Berg创作和演唱，比如开场的Love horts，Chapter 2 do you like a party？开始没多久后空灵钢琴声带来的Into the night。还有lady逃离旅馆时的Day in day out，最后lady逐渐死去的Better the Devil，Z Berg的歌曲和歌声绝对的加分项。
Z Berg还写了To Forget You，这首歌不是很明显，是大堂杀戮时有点模糊的背景乐。这首歌的演唱者是Ginnie Pallone Mollner，导演JT·莫讷的母亲。他的父亲Duke Mollner，则扮演了lady逃出房间时遇见的我也有枪的搞笑角色，属于是全家上场了。总而言之，我爱死Z Berg了。
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).
在未看正片时，《怪亲》预告片呈现出的情节和宣传给人感觉十分矛盾。
这部电影的宣传是从未见过的砍杀电影。而从预告片里，我只能看到平常的女主裸露着逃亡男主追杀的镜头，给人感觉不过是再一部充满暴力和厌女情节的虐杀电影而已。
不过，预告片也给我留下一个疑问：男主角名为demon，女主名为 the lady。
心里怀疑：男女主角名字这么草率吗，the lady的名字好像既简单也不简单。
看完正片，违背预期了，还是有惊喜的。
最直接的惊喜是影片开始和结尾。
电影采用章回体和非线性叙事。一开始，影片介绍我们即将看到的是对一名跨州连环杀手最后一次杀戮的戏剧化改编。这种对杀人狂纪实性的介绍类似《德州电锯杀人狂》。
画面一转，女主在一段覆盖片头字幕的延时慢动作镜头中，她正在逃离“恶魔”男主的追杀。接下来是一场无情的惊险追逐，整部影片就像一场扩展的、全长的追击戏。
怪异点突然来临。
女主逃到森林处理伤口，她从废弃的帐篷里拿出一瓶白酒倒在了出血的耳朵上。接着，似乎很平静地抽了一口烟。
内心：逃命的时候竟然还有心情吸烟，故事肯定不简单。
最后一幕，女主以为遇到了救星，却上了另一辆恶魔的车。正好对应了，既然你欺骗别人，也就别怪别人欺骗你。
回到女主的台词——“你知道像我这样的女人每次决定寻求一点乐趣时会冒什么样的风险吗？”
观众会质疑砍杀电影中男女应该扮演的角色。女性只能是讲求安全，不喜欢随意性行为的保守之人吗？男性都是等待下一个目标的强奸犯连环杀手吗？
猫鼠游戏可能要更聪明一些。
总之是不错的惊悚片，值得一看！
如果你厌倦了各种正确，想要看一部比较能表达作者真实想法的片子，那么《怪亲》是一个不错的选择。
无论是道德正确还是政治正确，都已经成为阻碍文艺作品进步的绊脚石。在以前没有网络的年代，个体发不出太大的声音，看到作品里有冒犯自己的地方，多半也是忍着，但现在阿猫阿狗都可以上网骂几句，管理部门再兴风作浪做一下引导，就会引起对创作者的围攻群殴，不仅影响创作者的收益，甚至败坏创作者的名声。民意推翻了事情的真实性，只要形成足够大的声浪就有道理，这在《legal high》里讨论过，也是埃隆马斯克曾经痛恨的一种现象并以实际行动反对它（反觉醒文化）。有时候把话语权完全交给民众不是好事，尤其是文艺作品，本身就是高于生活的，需要有创作者的自我表达，而民众只关心自己的感受，就会拉低作品的水平。放眼大陆，我们的绝大多数作品都深受其害，因为这边的基本盘质量比较低。
在美利坚也一样。我厌倦了好人一定有好报、小孩和狗不会死、黑人肯定是好人、性少数群体是弱势群体等等模式化的设定，已经很久没有在电影中看到像《被解放的姜戈》里塞缪尔杰克逊那样经典的黑人反派形象了。在《怪亲》这部片子里，导演探讨的是男女关系，虽然程度不深，但勇气可嘉。而且影片切入口很小，没有过大的野心，反而显得精致紧凑。但你要做好心理预期，耐住性子往下看，不要因为开头十分钟没有出现抓马的情节就关掉了。越往后反常规的情节越多。
镜头画面也很有美感，导演很懂得色彩的配搭。影片采用35毫米胶片拍摄，画面质感不错，尤其黑白部分看起来很舒适。音乐清新悦耳，与影片的内容形成反差。总体而言视听方面会得到不错的体验。
不过也请勿寄予太高的期待，只用作打发假期无聊的时间，思想性什么的，并不具备，当作一部不落俗套的爽片看即可。
摄影技术的美感和女主角的演技绝对是这部平庸电影的增色神器，特别是女主角最后的濒死长镜头足以让这个杀手有了媲美《天生杀人狂》的气质。
影片剧情虽然简单，但是利用倒叙和插叙的手法将时间线打乱，以次增加悬疑感，但实际上一开始男主追杀女主时就注定了结局不会诡奇到哪里去，想玩反转那必然追杀者成受害人，受害人其实如《趣味游戏》般变态。特别是女主在约炮后又一会儿虐恋一会儿嗑药的就已经印证了这一点。
可以说女主的演技撑起了这部影片的绝大部分看点，从无辜被害者和暴虐杀人狂无缝连接，戏耍别人的同时偏偏给了她感性真诚的理由，也就是他人即魔鬼，为此最后那个她看向后视镜发现自己也成了魔鬼的镜头我反复看了很多次才暂停成功，可惜化妆这里有点拉垮，这里展现的仅仅是一个戴了红头套的男性魔鬼形象而已，如果是那种正在融化的、更粘稠的血肉模糊的形象更完美。
这里其实也是一个悬念，提供了影片的另一个思路：疯癫的女主所看见的正是伪装成人类的魔鬼，所以一路杀伐不绝却也不乏原则的她只杀本质是魔鬼之人，所以最后她掏枪是要杀死自己，不料女司机行动飞速误会她要伤害自己所以先干掉了她。
实话实说，这部电影是我今年最期待的恐怖片之一。主要是从去年看完《厄舍府的崩塌》后，我就很想看一部薇拉·菲茨杰拉德的新作。尽管扮相不再古典，但在该片中其角色依然延续了神秘女性的色彩。用这种神秘与无处不在的红色，导演也是上演了场非常颠覆和争议的连环杀手之旅。
你是连环杀手吗？在这个毛骨悚然的问题后，男人demon使出全力似乎在掐人脖子的场面一闪而过。这是一场凶杀吗？在一切问题都没得到答案时，故事就这样进入了正式章节。
森林中的道路上，两辆车正展开追逐，前车的女人lady恐惧地看着后车的步步逼近，而后车的demon正在边嗑药边猛踩油门。停下车，demon的利索一枪截停了前车。lady逃进森林，demon则持枪紧追不舍。角色的善恶似乎很明显，但这只是6章故事中的第3章。
首先，电影开场的播报得补充一下。
这段非常《德州电锯杀人狂》的设计，说的是一个连环杀手。大意就是2018年至2020年间，21世纪最多产且独特的美国连环杀手展开了一场精心策划的跨州杀戮狂潮。这场狂潮始于科罗拉多州的丹佛，经过大湖，扩展到怀俄明州和爱达荷州中部，最终在俄勒冈州胡德河县的茂密森林中达到高潮。 本剧根据警方采访、目击者的详细陈述、证词以及各执法部门的观察记录，戏剧化地再现了这场狂潮中最后已知的杀戮事件的真实故事。
不过千万不要被true story这正儿八经的说法给骗了，《德州电锯杀人狂》的开场也是这么唬人来营造真实感的，有种早期伪纪录元素的感觉。《怪亲》的导演JT·莫讷在采访中没有给出什么真实答案，因为这杀手就是虚构的，这播报是一种氛围营造的小手法和与德电连接的处理。
二者最重要的一点，正是让怪亲与德电相连接。1974年托比·霍珀的《德州电锯杀人狂》，毋庸置疑的经典，同时它也是好莱坞恐怖电影一个重要元素的奠基者——幸存的女孩。在这部电影之后，结局总有一个女孩幸存的规则成为恐怖电影的主流套路之一。可以说这是70年代女性主义在恐怖电影类型中的一次演变。特别是1986年托比·霍珀回归的《德州电锯杀人狂2》，女性拿起电锯的反杀之舞，这含义不用多解释了。
而《怪亲》可以说是对德电留下的幸存女孩规则的完全颠覆，它努力营造了幸存女孩的开场和各种危险环境，试图告诉观众“这是一部女性被男性连环杀手追杀的电影”。
这部电影甚至有女性逃离后的搭车，大宅中的追杀。而在最后它打破了一切，告诉大家这都是假的，我们的超级大坏蛋，杀人狂el就是那个幸存女孩。另一个方面，《怪亲》是对2022年《野蛮人》女性主义的黑暗颠覆。《野蛮人》中，开场没多久就能看到经典的争论问题——男女共处一室，陌生男人的危险性。以及后面发展出的女性互助，对邪恶的终极复仇。
《怪亲》的Chapter 1 mister snuffle中，lady和demon在车中也讨论了男女共处一室这个问题。之后lady逃生中的酒店员工以及女警官，甚至贡献了And just because I have a vagina doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to a fucking thing I have to say的名台词。
然而，不仅幸存女孩是假的，《怪亲》转而讲述了男女共处一室时女性的恐怖威力和女性互助时女杀手的百般戏耍。不得不说，我完全理解很多评论对这部电影的批判，因为它的反套路确实很呛很尖锐。但我觉得对比着这些电影来看，还是有点意思的反套路和碰撞。
另外，看完的观众应该能明白，影片的故事其实非常非常的简单。只是一个身份调换了的连环杀手故事，如果没有导演在章节上的错位处理，可以说故事本身没有什么看点也更冒犯了。很明显，而且导演自己也承认该片受到了昆汀作品之类的章节电影影响。
这手法无疑是有效的，可惜在身份揭露后电影就进入另一种状态了。在身份揭露后，4、2、6已经沦为直白纯粹的杀手桥段，不再有身份转换的趣味。而尾声在lady的自白中则进入了一种神神叨叨的风格，女性互助也终于擦亮了双眼，有毒的人可算是挂了。
除去争议性的情节，导演对于配乐和镜头色彩的运用我个人还是挺中意的。整部电影的配乐充斥着电子乐的轰隆、弦乐的尖锐和轻松美妙的钢琴声，有几场音乐一起来让我仿佛在听《信条》开场的Rainy Night in Tallinn。
汽车正面镜头飞驰而过的紧张，Chapter 4 the mountain people三人组成的诡异杀戮场面，lady藏进冰箱时的镜头推进，非常出色的氛围营造。在Chapter 1 mister snuffle和Chapter 2 do you like a party？中，导演大量使用蓝色和红色的光影，用以塑造两人交心的放松场面和风雨欲来的血腥死亡。特别是lady在厕所中的红色独秀，让我想起《红色房间》通过红色对杀手粉丝的精神进行反映的设计。35mm拍摄的导演骄傲我倒是不怎么get，就像《怖谷鸟》也是35mm又如何，I dont care。
薇拉·菲茨杰拉德在电影中的表演也很惊艳，厕所中的情绪和细节，杀人逃亡时的疯批感，我最喜欢的是最终死亡桥段的落寞与痛苦。凯尔·加尔纳的演出也很好的玩弄了观众的心理，在一个变态男和正常人间游离。导演采访中说，他的要求是二人演出真情实感，而不是专门误导观众。不管怎么说，真情和误导这两点似乎都做到了。
最后要说的，可能有点太靠后了。无论电影怎么样，我都很爱导演所选的歌曲。这些歌曲都由Z Berg创作和演唱，比如开场的Love horts，Chapter 2 do you like a party？开始没多久后空灵钢琴声带来的Into the night。还有lady逃离旅馆时的Day in day out，最后lady逐渐死去的Better the Devil，Z Berg的歌曲和歌声绝对的加分项。
Z Berg还写了To Forget You，这首歌不是很明显，是大堂杀戮时有点模糊的背景乐。这首歌的演唱者是Ginnie Pallone Mollner，导演JT·莫讷的母亲。他的父亲Duke Mollner，则扮演了lady逃出房间时遇见的我也有枪的搞笑角色，属于是全家上场了。总而言之，我爱死Z Berg了。