(Editorial note: This post contains spoilers for Strange treasure and discusses the film’s later twists and events in detail. Read on only if you’ve already seen the film, or if you came here to be spoiled.)
We hear a man — “The Demon” — being asked if he’s a serial killer. We see him apparently choking someone to death, with the sound of desperate panting in the background. We see a crawl that frames this story as a dramatization of the latest killings of “the most prolific and unique American serial killer of the 21st century.” We see a woman — “The Lady” — running across a field, panicked and bloodied.
Strange treasure begins with a few black-and-white shots, but writer-director JT Mollner is much more interested in the gray areas of this story. Our fair Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) is in fact the savage serial killer, and The Demon (Kyle Gallner) who stalks her is a would-be victim who survived and wants to take her out. The deep-seated expectations that would lead viewers to initially misinterpret all of this — all the baggage we bring to serial killer stories — are exactly what drove Mollner to write this film in the first place.
“I started thinking about tropes, genre archetypes, and the ‘final girl,’ and I started thinking about gender stereotypes and expectations,” Mollner tells Polygon in an interview ahead of Strange treasure‘s theatrical release. “All of these things (make it so) that we’re so quick to judge people without knowing their whole story, or what they’ve been through that day or whatever. And so it started to become an interesting exercise in seeing how this story unfolded as I discovered it, and then finding ways to exploit those tropes and subvert them in a way that would surprise the audience.”
Whether you saw the twist coming with your first glimpses of The Lady and The Demon, or felt your stomach drop when she first showed her hand, Strange treasure constantly plays with your expectations. Even the look of the film, courtesy of director of photography Giovanni Ribisi, constantly tries to evoke the tonal contrasts of the story.
“One of the things that was really important to us, and creating the world visually, was that these two people were experiencing this journey in a fairy tale,” Ribisi says. “And the mission was this idea of blood on the flowerbed. But that flowerbed was this beautiful, surreal dream world.”
Within that fantasy space, Mollner and Ribisi wanted to ask a lot of questions — but they didn’t want to give the film any answers, but rather explore the darkness that lurks beneath any “picturesque or beautiful” space. The film was designed to maintain that fairytale side of things, but at the same time openly declare itself a thriller, using blocks of color and story to separate things, only to muddy them further.
“We wanted to focus on those primary colors to create emotional resonance,” Mollner says.
“It’s always different with every film: some films that I’ve written and others have written are meant to have a very specific moral or socio-political message. Some films are meant to be understood narratively, and that’s the most important objectively; they are procedural films. And some films are meant to be felt. And this film, above all, is meant to be felt — and it is meant to be felt in different ways by different people in the audience.”
Image: Magenta Light Studios
Although Mollner does not want to explain exactly what he means, it is not difficult to pick up his thread: As he says, Strange treasure trades heavily on gender stereotypes, and more than once The Lady gains the upper hand by exploiting the optics associated with a bleeding, crying woman on the run. No doubt different people, with different gender identities and conceptions, will interpret what they see as “the film’s goals” differently.
That’s something Fitzgerald felt very strongly about playing The Lady. She does have her own sense of the character, though: “I think she’s someone who’s desperately searching for something that’s out of her reach. And she ends up sabotaging herself,” Fitzgerald says. “I think the core of the character is someone who deep hungry for connection, and trying to find connection, and then there’s an essential betrayal of trust. And from there, everything falls apart.”
But she still hesitates to give a definitive assessment of The Lady, because she appreciates what makes the genre of the novel so “exciting.” Strange treasure is how it “gives a lot of room for interpretation, and there’s a lot of room for different perspectives.”
The facts of the story are clear at the end of the day: The Lady is a serial killer and The Demon is her intended prey. Both refuse to go quietly into this good night. As for who comes out on top and what the film is trying to say — well, that’s something we’re left to grapple with.
To that end, we want to create a space for that. From 3:00 to 5:00 PM EDT on Wednesday, August 28, a few of us from Polygon will be in the comments thread here, talking about our thoughts and feelings around Strange treasure and its twists. Join us if you like!