The world of Don’t Fear Darling is picture-perfect at a look: an organization city known as Victory, California, the place a bunch of mid-century-modern houses have magically sprouted within the desert. Think about somebody opened a Mad Males theme park in Palm Springs, with the boys outfitted in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and the ladies in glitzy attire holding everybody’s martinis recent. It’s a selected form of throwback fantasy, one through which husbands peck their spouse on the cheek earlier than heading to work, then return residence anticipating a roast within the oven. So it could not shock you to study that every one will not be because it appears.
Olivia Wilde’s new movie, her follow-up to the fizzy teen comedy Booksmart, owes a debt to many spooky dramas concerning the darkish aspect of the suburbs—suppose The Stepford Wives, with much more of a sci-fi edge. However it’s a bizarrely paced film doomed extra by a thudding, repetitive narrative than by the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded within the lead-up to its pageant premiere. Viewers can inform from the get-go that one thing sinister is afoot in Victory, but it takes the protagonist, Alice Chambers (performed by Florence Pugh), almost all the runtime to begin getting any solutions. The expertise may need been worthwhile if Don’t Fear Darling constructed to a grand reveal, however quite than providing satisfying solutions, its ultimate twist solely provokes extra baffled questions.
Wilde will not be untalented behind the digicam. Booksmart’s easy “one loopy night time” story was powered by all types of intelligent visible tips, and Don’t Fear Darling could be very slick by design. The world of Victory is meant to be a fascinating dream you’d by no means need to get up from, and Wilde and her glorious cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, make it appear to be a David Hockney portray come to life, all crisp colours and stark blue skies. Each morning, the entire city’s males pile into their ’50s vehicles and drive off to their mysterious jobs working for a person named Frank (Chris Pine) on one thing known as the “Victory Challenge.” The women—together with a gossipy mother named Bunny (Wilde herself); Frank’s imperious spouse, Shelley (Gemma Chan); and the distant-seeming Margaret (KiKi Layne)—principally kvetch by the pool and take elaborate ballet lessons (Wilde shoots these from the ceiling, making the ladies’s Busby Berkeley–esque dance strikes appear to be the menacing habits of a hive thoughts).
Alice first gleans that one thing is awry when Margaret begins to behave aberrantly; when her buddy is whisked away, Alice begins having unusual visions of a aircraft crashing within the distance, or of attempting to crack eggs and discovering nothing inside them. A lot of Don’t Fear Darling’s runtime is anxious with surreal occasions like these, that are dismissed by everybody round Alice. Probably the greatest actors of her technology, Pugh does her greatest to painting Alice’s crumbling psychological state with integrity, however the script she’s working with is exhaustingly cyclical. Any concern she brings to Bunny, or to Frank, or to her devoted husband, Jack (Harry Kinds), is rapidly brushed apart, and a threatening physician (Timothy Simons) is readily available to prescribe tranquilizers on the first trace of bother.
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Kinds is maybe the film’s largest subject past its underbaked screenplay; he’s an oddly flat presence regardless of his standing as a worldwide famous person. Kinds blends in nice when he’s simply one of many boys sipping whiskey and speaking reverently concerning the genius of Frank’s Victory Challenge, however he can’t deal with the large feelings required later within the movie as Alice begins to unravel. Don’t Fear Darling has a whole lot of yelling and screaming about how issues are Not Fairly Proper, and whereas Pugh can try this in her sleep, Kinds comes off as uncomfortable all through. That’s a severe impediment for a film that’s primarily about how the ’50s-housewife imaginative and prescient is just a male-power fantasy—a premise that will require Kinds to be a extra malevolent, commanding presence.
Don’t Fear Darling might have saved itself with an excellent ending. I shall not spoil the movie’s conclusion, however it left me retroactively much more flabbergasted by the 2 hours of round plotting I’d simply witnessed. What’s “occurring” in Victory is disclosed, in a way of talking, however I might fill a pocket book with additional questions I had about how the curious deliberate group features. Wilde’s movie goals to be a feminist parable about how this idealized imaginative and prescient of the previous is definitely a curdled imaginative and prescient of coupledom. Abstractly, that’s a strong idea; in execution, the film’s absurdity overpowers its message.
