Review: DON'T WORRY DARLING

A '50s display house world set in the desert like a nuclear test site. Inside one of the houses an afternoon party has the catalogue perfect wives balancing filled whisky glasses on their heads as the husbands cheer them on. We widen out to see the rest of the lifestyle is the same: cold war bacon and eggs in the morning when the wives send their husbands off to work with kisses and last minute spruces or lunch boxes thrown in the passenger seats of cars that are all chrome and fins, dinner ready for the breadwinner's appearance at the door at COB. Above it all, Frank the charismatic salesman of lifestyle, has it all under control. 

It's not unnervingly perfect, there are rivalries, boredom alcohol and bitchiness buzzing at every turn, but it all smooths out to a postcard perfect vista. But Alice, like her namesake through the looking glass, starts noticing the flaws: cartons of empty eggshells, mirrors that aren't like real mirrors, planes that seem to crash but can't be found after checking. Detail after detail comes up for test-flunking scrutiny, not least being Alice's precursor in discovery removes herself from the picture in a way that is completely refabricated by the authority figures. Things are not good but there seems no way to fight them.

Oliva Wilde's second feature tackles the dystopia scenario with great force on the beauty of the lifestyle but less oomph on the weirdness of the tale. Apart from a few impossible plot holes the overall scheme works but, given the strength of the performances, there is a curious constant downturn in traction, like a slowly leaking tyre. Florence Pugh is typically magnetic, Chris Pine is just as typically unnervingly urbane, Wilde herself is a hoot as Bunny and even popster Harry Styles fronts up with a credible turn and they are surrounded by a palpable world of gleaming golden day lifestyle fashion.

I noted at the action packed climax that I'd been missing all sense of pushback which had taken so long in coming from the thinning veneer of civilised discourse in the second act. I wonder if I just wanted more violence to go with the anger. While we are bombarded with a program of visual motifs that increasingly bring home something we already know, we get a lot less of the very canny Alice working out how to break the oppression. Sometimes, she steps back to blend in, regrouping to work out the next move, but the other characters seem less convinced than we are about her sincerity. It feels like a level or two of the realm at the base of this rabbit hole might have been dispensed with to push the well established and strongly delivered themes of conformity, identity and the fragility of the culture. There are many really well turned moments here but the big messaging just works to push them back down again.

There's a none too subtle hint in the greater culture that the character Frank is a take on reactionary postulator Jordan Peterson. Wilde and Pine steer the role away from this, however, to present an entity much more like a Fox News pundit. Of course it wouldn't work well dramatically (or even comically) if they'd let the character ramble until everyone else threw up their hands (like the real thing) but the character as given offers a lot less to rail against, he just doesn't have the same brittle arrogance and Pine is too effortlessly charming. You might want to sock Frank on the jaw but you never get to the point where you'd happily wish you had a flamethrower.

There was a small group of dickheads in the back row at my screening who were talking incessantly and often laughing at whatever was going on in their own conversation. At one point I heard their chatter (mostly under the film's soundtrack) cease, footfalls and looked around to see them leaving. Really? They paid twenty-four bucks for that? This film does have merit and if I rant against it it's more from letdown than contempt, but never was I so gladdened to imagine the sense of ripoff that those honking cretins must have felt on their way out. It almost felt meta.