The 1980s Dark Comedy That Truly Lives Up to Its Name

What starts as a playful rom-com spirals into a chaotic, genre-bending nightmare of a film.

Something Wild is a colorful, offbeat dark comedy from director Jonathan Demme that delivers on the promise of its title. What starts as a goofy ’80s rom-com depicting a fanciful weekend tryst between a soon-to-be Wall Street VP (Jeff Daniels) and an edgy, mysterious woman (Melanie Griffith) soon turns genuinely nightmarish when her homicidal ex-husband (Ray Liotta, never better) shows up.

Full of weird flourishes and a spectacular soundtrack (The Feelies show up to play an entire set at a high school reunion!), Something Wild is a vivid piece of unconventional filmmaking. It’s also cleverly conceived, with Daniels’ Charlie Driggs as the prototypical American charging blindly into disaster—heading west, making very bad decisions, and buying everything on credit.

In Demme’s American landscape, as well as in Charlie himself, something unexpectedly primal and frightening lurks just under the surface. (As an aside: this film would make a great double feature with Scorsese’s After Hours.)

If you aren’t connvivned, consider what Roger Ebert said about Something Wild: “Demme is a master of finding the bizarre in the ordinary [and…] this is one of those rare movies where the plot seems surprised at what the characters do.”