Quickly into the candy-colored feminist gothic “Don’t Fear Darling,” the director Olivia Wilde ideas her hand. The film takes place in a desert city, Victory, the place every little thing seems good and fairly, together with the midcentury houses on the finish of a cul-de-sac. It’s a pleasant neighborhood and, provided that the story is ready within the Fifties, extra various than you’d anticipate. However Wilde lets you understand straightaway that there’s one thing off right here: All the things is simply too tidy, too uniform and too, too excellent, together with the ladies’s smiles.
Shy, daring, coquettish or mocking, a lady’s smile is richly signifying, one thing that Wilde, an actress turned director, actually is aware of. It may be a thriller, an invite, a deflection; generally it’s a reward, though one which comes with a value. “It’s the Sleeping Magnificence’s smile that crowns the efforts of Prince Charming,” as Simone de Beauvoir writes in “The Second Intercourse,” the captive princess’ gratitude validating the prince’s heroism. The lads within the film aren’t charming or heroic, but the ladies smile always, stretching their lipsticked mouths so vast, it’s a surprise their faces don’t crack.
One does, although it takes an interminably very long time for the fissures to change into seismic. One thing begins troubling Alice (Florence Pugh) quickly after the film opens. She lives on the cul-de-sac, and like the opposite wives, she waves goodbye to her husband, Jack (Harry Types), as he drives off to work. At evening, cocktail in hand, Alice greets him, an impeccably coifed and dressed current that he eagerly unwraps. A lot of the remainder of the time, she cleans their home, sharpening and vacuuming and washing — the cinematography is suitably shiny and crisp — to the sound of a thriller man’s droning voice.
It’s a superb, intriguing setup. All the things has been buffed to gleam, together with Wilde, who performs Bunny, considered one of Alice’s neighbors. However you shortly discover the dearth of mess, and particularly the relative absence of these brokers of chaos, a.ok.a. youngsters. There’s a contact of Stepford to this comfortable, shiny place, and a splash of comedy in its excesses. However it’s apparent and blunt, and early on when the wives wave bye, all following comparable choreography, I flashed on the evil planet in Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” the place every little thing — homes, adults and youngsters bouncing balls — seems eerily near-identical.
Alice has clearly tumbled down a bizarre rabbit gap. However one downside with “Don’t Fear Darling” is that Wilde is so taken with the world that she’s meticulously created — with its colourful veneer, martini glasses and James Bond poster — that she will be able to’t let it go. So, as Alice floats via her dream-life, Wilde reveals off this dollhouse, taking the character to a rustic membership, onto a trolley and to go to Jack’s charismatic boss, Frank (a silkily menacing Chris Pine), whose residence seems like a bachelor’s pad out of an vintage subject of Playboy, besides that this one comes with a spouse, Shelley (Gemma Chan).
Frank and his male staff’ excessive deference to him counsel there’s extra to this world than its shiny exterior, as do some period-inappropriate particulars, just like the topless girl strolling poolside in public and Alice carrying solely a person’s costume shirt exterior her entrance door. However even because the dissonance builds and Alice grasps that one thing is amiss, the film stalls. Alice turns into misplaced in thought, seems puzzled, hallucinates, seems much less puzzled and so forth as Wilde embraces a visible motif — the circle — that, after the second, third, fourth time she deploys it, loses its punch and usefulness, turning into an unintended metaphor for a film that retains returning to the identical level.
Wilde does some wonderful work right here, regardless of hammering the identical notes early and infrequently. (The screenplay is by Katie Silberman, one of many writers of “Booksmart,” Wilde’s extra profitable function directing debut.) However she isn’t a robust sufficient filmmaker at this level to navigate across the story’s weaknesses, a lot much less transcend them. That’s particularly powerful on the actors, who — except for Pine — ship one-dimensional performances that by no means trace at what could be churning inside their enticing heads. For her half, Pugh is simply too vibrant, too alive and simply too vigorously full-bodied from the get-go for a task that requires a slow-dawning awakening.
If Pugh’s efficiency by no means will get beneath the shiny, satirical floor, it’s as a result of there’s no place for it or her to go. The film’s tackle gender roles is stinging, however its targets are amorphous (sure, agreed, sexism is unhealthy) and punctiliously nonpartisan, and its tackle the prison-house of the standard female function — what Betty Friedan referred to as the “comfortable housewife heroine” in her 1963 basic “The Female Mystique” — is shallow. Many cycles of feminist progress and sexist backlash have occurred since that e book hit, however, pretty or not, the present political local weather and assaults on ladies’s rights demand greater than a intelligent mash-up between “Mad Males” and “Get Out.”
Don’t Fear Darling
Rated R for intercourse, language and violence. Operating time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters.