Shot by Giovanni Ribisi, the original, entrancing serial killer thriller ‘Strange Darling’ delights in twists

“Strange Darling” — 3.5 stars

At first blush, “Strange Darling” doesn’t seem to trade in ingenuity.

The pseudo-surrealist serial killer tale unfolds against the Cascadian woodlands in decidedly Lynchian fashion. Opening text claiming this fictional yarn is a true-crime dramatization comes straight out of the Coen brothers’ playbook. The remixed chronology and exploitation aesthetic scream of Tarantino idolization.

But reducing such taut and twisty genre fare to auteur pastiche would sell short the qualities that, whatever writer-director JT Mollner’s influences, make it one of the year’s most original films. Teaming up with actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, Mollner (making his second movie after 2016’s “Outlaws and Angels”) has crafted a cat-and-mouse game that ensnares you in its opening moments and tightens its grip with every stylistic swing and subversive swerve. It’s unsettling and entrancing and altogether audacious. Amid a crowded summer of elevated horror, “Strange Darling” rises above.

Or make that “Strange Darling: A Thriller in 6 Chapters,” as the movie is billed on-screen. The text explains that this saga follows the “most prolific and unique American serial killer of the 21st century” in the final days of a bloody rampage that culminated in Hood River County, Oregon. When Mollner promptly skips ahead to Chapter 3, Willa Fitzgerald’s panicked heroine — sporting red scrubs and a bloody ear to match — is already on the run from a gun-toting, cocaine-snorting brute simply known as the Demon (Kyle Gallner, ever adept at steely intimidation). As more pieces of the story lock into place, we learn that these two were intertwined by a one-night stand that descended into something darker.

To describe the plot in much more detail would spoil the pleasures of a narrative that wields its nonlinear approach as not a cheap gimmick but a rich exercise in shattering preconceptions. Although “Strange Darling” dutifully delivers white-knuckle tension and cinematic panache, Mollner’s savvy script also speaks to the unbalanced power dynamic a woman typically accepts when inviting the advances of an unfamiliar man. As Fitzgerald’s character, credited as the Lady, rhetorically asks the Demon in their earliest interaction: “Do you have any idea the kind of risk a woman like me takes every time she agrees to have a little bit of fun?”

Ultimately, the film emerges as a parable about preying on female trust and vulnerability (even if one late scene takes this idea uncomfortably far). As our avatar for this experience, Fitzgerald stuns with a primal performance that’s impossible to do justice without unpacking the movie’s more delectable developments. Inhabiting a character forced to make many a tough choice, particularly when her feminist outlook and survivalist instincts conflict, Fitzgerald conveys the necessary desperation but also beguiles in her more mischievous moments with a half-smile and a lick of her lips.

This sleek thriller doesn’t introduce many other characters, though Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr. do leave an outsize impression as a couple of kooky, mountain-dwelling hippies with an affinity for puzzles and decadent Sunday breakfasts. But composer Craig DeLeon emerges as an unseen standout, serving up a score that shrieks and swells and overwhelms in all the right ways. In an effective embellishment, Mollner dots the film with unnerving folk ballads courtesy of the indie rocker Z Berg.

Then there’s Ribisi, the “Avatar” antagonist and “Sneaky Pete” star who makes his debut as the director of photography on a feature film. “Strange Darling,” which giddily declares it was “shot entirely on 35 mm film” before the first image appears, unspools with vintage grain and modern flair as Ribisi unearths an eeriness in intimacy — often while bathing Fitzgerald and Gallner in neon blues and striking reds. He also weaves in black-and-white imagery, symmetrical shots and continuous takes, for good measure. If Ribisi never shot another film, he could walk away content that his work here left nothing unsaid.

Let’s hope that’s not the case. One of Hollywood’s sturdiest character actors is, it turns out, a heck of a cinematographer. Even behind the camera, “Strange Darling” keeps the twists coming.

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Rated R for mature language, sexual material, drug use and violence. 96 minutes.