Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear war thriller “A House of Dynamite” opened in theaters this week. Ever since her 2008 Iraq war drama and Oscar darling “The Hurt Locker,” Bigelow has stuck to similar films: see “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Detroit.” The first half of her career, though, shows she’s capable of even more.
Bigelow’s 20th-century resume includes offbeat films like “Near Dark,” a neo-Western starring vampires, the surfer and bank robber classic “Point Break,” and the cyberpunk rave “Strange Days.” The latter unfortunately flopped at the box office (only earning $17 million on a $42 million budget) and has since then has lapsed in and out of wide availability. It was briefly added to the HBO Max library in 2023, but has since vanished back into the streaming ether. 30 years on, “Strange Days” enjoys a cult following, and it’s more than worth scouring your local thrift stores to find a DVD copy of it.
Released in 1995 but set in December 1999, “Strange Days” is a movie made for the turn of the millennium. The movie follows former LAPD officer turned dealer Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), but he’s not trafficking ordinary narcotics. Lenny’s product is SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), devices that record memories and let users experience them vicariously; you don’t just view the memories, the SQUID taps into your brain and lets you experience it firsthand. It’s an obvious allegory for living in the past, appropriate for a film that was about the 20th century embracing the future.
Lenny is dipping into his own supply; he spends his days reliving his memories of his ex-girlfriend, rock star Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis), who left him for a music mogul. Lenny is so hung up on the past that he doesn’t notice his friend, limo driver Mace (Angella Bassett), pines after him the way he does for Faith. Lenny gets his chance to reconnect, and way more than he asked for, when Faith’s friend Iris (Brigitte Bako) is murdered.
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Strange Days is sci-fi noir perfection
Juliette Lewis as Faith Justin in Strange Days (1995) – Lightstorm Entertainment
“Strange Days” was co-written by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron, based on an idea he’d first had in 1985. The near-future sci-fi setting has a lot of Cameron’s flourishes; Mace is a badass woman in the same vein as Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, and like most Cameron stories, there is a grand romance at the center of this one.
Ralph Fiennes famously has a wide acting range, and in the years since “Strange Days,” he’s proven hard to pin down. He can be scary (Voldemort in “Harry Potter”), hilarious (M. Gustave in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), and both at the same time (foul-mouthed crime boss Harry in “In Bruges”). Yet this past year, he also gave one of 2025’s greatest performances as an eccentric but kind doctor in “28 Years Later.” Lenny is a character type Fiennes doesn’t play often — a sleazy and down bad screw-up — but he’s still a natural at it.
As Faith, Juliette Lewis plays a rock star so well that she became one in real life. She covers one of the greatest of ’90s alt girl tunes, PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me.” It’s a song about refusing to let go of your lover, one that creeps along from a quiet plea to a screaming wail, and a fitting music choice for a movie where our hero ties himself to memories of better days.
The key to understanding “Strange Days” deeper than its cool and grungy vibes is that it’s a film noir story in a cyberpunk setting, a la “Blade Runner.” An ex-cop drawn into a twisty murder plot involving his former lover? Humphrey Bogart could easily fit into those broad strokes.
Yet for its classical Hollywood storytelling, “Strange Days” has also been praised as a prescient forecast of the millennium to come. The internet has consumed modern life and addicted us all to voyeurism, just like people who watch SQUID recordings in “Strange Days.” What cruel irony that the internet currently offers no legal way to see this movie.
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