The tone of the Louisiana-shot “Darlin’” wanders somewhat arbitrarily from “Nell”-type drama to satire to horror and comedy-horror.
Discovering them long gone from the hospital, she goes on a rampaging search, the body count of which seems to exist simply to lend the film sufficient marketable genre content. Assuming Darlin’ has given birth already, the Woman is prepared to reclaim both young mother and infant. But assimilation here also means absorbing the more rigid authority figures’ hellfire-and-damnation teachings, with Darlin’ taking all too literally the notion that she may have a “devil inside her” (potential spoilers ahead this paragraph, starting with the explanation that she is in fact pregnant). Mute and illiterate to begin with, Darlin’ gradually adjusts to this new life, as the initially wary other girls accept her into their little community. More dubious support comes from the Bishop (Bryan Batt of “Mad Men”), a smirking cleric who intends to leverage her presumed progress from hellcat to docile maiden for fundraising purposes.
There, her new allies are staffer Sister Jennifer (Nora-Jane Noone) and rebellious fellow student Billy (Maddie Nichols).
Once slightly tamed, she’s turned over to a Catholic boarding school for wayward girls. But she’s so unused to regular human contact that she has to be sedated upon arrival, acting like a panicked wild animal toward everyone save a sympathetic gay nurse (Cooper Andrews, another “Walking Dead” alum). Growing to adolescence in the great outdoors, her older siblings having died off over time, Darlin’ (Lauryn Canny) - so named for the inscription on a charm bracelet that’s her sole memento from domesticated life - is deposited at a hospital entrance by the ferocious Woman (McIntosh again) for reasons gradually revealed in flashback.
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