Surface tension

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This article was published 24/09/2022 (1434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An entertaining but disappointing dystopian feminist fable about men, women and power, this second film by actor-director Olivia Wilde looks swell.

The minty mid-century decor, the candy-coloured cars, the fabulous frocks, the swanky supper clubs, the sweeps of desert landscape — they all make a big, beautifully choreographed visual splash.

Underneath all this gorgeousness, of course, lurks something sinister, which is made apparent within the first three minutes of the film. This too-early tip-off hints at structural issues in the script, from Katie Silberman, who collaborated with Wilde on Booksmart, along with Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke.

Their ambitious unpacking of this seductive, deceptive suburban paradise never really clicks, but Don’t Worry Darling still gets a lot of momentum from Wilde’s dynamic direction, some committed performances and some intriguing — though ultimately underdeveloped — ideas.

Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) live in a cul-de-sac in a 1950s planned community. In the morning, the men drive off to work as the wives wave, both genders acting in unsettling unison.

The men all work for the Victory Project, which is run by Frank (Chris Pine). Less of a boss and more of a charismatic cult leader, Frank likes to talk about the need for order and the danger of chaos, giving off a creepy Jordan Peterson vibe.

Ostensibly the Victory Project is concerned with “the development of progressive materials,” but its larger mission seems to be “building a new society.” (“Whose world? Our world!” the men chant at one particularly disturbing office gathering.)

Whatever the men are up to, their project causes tremors to ripple through the town with such regularity that the inhabitants barely notice. They just pick up their highballs to keep them from spilling.

The women, including Alice’s best friend, Bunny (played by Wilde), spend their time cleaning their shiny material goods and making sure they look fresh when they greet their husbands with martinis at the end of the day.

In the morning, they don their housedresses and scrub. Later, they attend stern ballet classes taught by Frank’s wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan), who tells them: “There is beauty in control. There is grace in symmetry.” They do a lot of shopping.

To maintain this seemingly enviable lifestyle, there is only one rule. The women must never venture into the desert that rings their little community, which is designated as the realm of men and their mysterious labour.

There are echoes of The Stepford Wives and Severance and The Truman Show as we segue from suburban parody to horror thriller. Alice is troubled by hallucinations and shards of memories from some other life. She is haunted by the fate of next-door neighbour Margaret (KiKi Layne), whose questioning of Victory Project platitudes and erratic behaviour have led to rumours of a breakdown, or worse.

Sensing that something terrible is happening, Alice is first soothed and condescended to, then gaslit and bullied. The word “hysteria” comes up a lot.

Pugh, who has proven in films such as Midsommar and Little Women that she has enormous expressive presence, grounds the film’s super-stylized look in real emotional stakes. Pop star Styles is all floppy-haired charm but remains harder to read, though as we move toward the story’s conclusion, we realize there might be a good reason for that.

As we plummet into the Big Reveal — Black Mirror fans might see it coming — things fall apart, logistically and conceptually, though in an undeniably spectacular way.

One final note: Anyone with a Twitter account knows the film’s much anticipated rollout ended up devolving into a PR disaster. All that social media gossip about on-set intrigue feels irrelevant to this finished product, though, except perhaps that the many misogynistic messages aimed at Wilde — one of the few female directors working in big-budget studio pictures — just happen to parallel some of the patriarchal tropes the film takes on.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com