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Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Fear Darling” is a film that, in latest weeks, has been besieged and consumed by offscreen dramas, none of which I’ll recount right here, besides to notice that when a movie’s lead actress appears actively reluctant to publicize the movie in query, that’s an indication of some critical discord. But it could be vastly unfair to permit this tempest in a teapot of gossipy turmoil to affect one’s emotions concerning the film. If you wish to speak about issues associated to “Don’t Fear Darling,” you want look no additional than at what’s onscreen.
The movie, written by Katie Silberman, with the good manufacturing design of Katie Byron, is a sort of candy-colored “Stepford Wives” within the Twilight Zone meets “The Handmaid’s Story” for the age of torn-at-the-seams democracy. In principle, this could add as much as a juicy watch. Wilde, whose first function was the witty and vivacious 2019 girls-on-a-bender comedy “Booksmart” (that is her second movie), is a gifted director who is aware of the right way to set a temper. In “Don’t Fear Darling,” she does that to the max, and for a when you get caught up in it (or, at the very least, I did). Between the pop ambition, the tasty dream visuals, and the presence of Harry Styles in his first lead position, “Don’t Fear Darling” should not have any bother discovering an viewers. However the film takes you on a trip that will get progressively much less scintillating because it goes alongside.
Because it opens, we hear the attractive bop of Ray Charles’ 1958 model of “Night time Time Is the Proper Time,” and we’re plunged into what seems to be like a cocktail social gathering from the “Mad Males” period, besides that everybody is so loud and garish and lewd and hyped that you simply surprise if the Gibson martinis are spiked with Ecstasy. This isn’t what cocktail events had been like again then. However that’s as a result of this isn’t again then. It’s now.
We’re in a wierd deliberate neighborhood someplace in a palm-tree desert, the place each house is the very same white flat cookie-cutter mannequin (they appear to be one thing Frank Lloyd Wright would have designed for IKEA). Every morning, the lads get into their massive curvy postwar vehicles, that are in numerous lollipop shades, and exit their suburban cul-de-sac in a choreographed line. They’re headed for an additional day’s work on the Victory Undertaking, a analysis operation so prime secret they’re not even allowed to speak about it with their wives. The usual company line is that they’re engaged on “the event of progressive supplies,” which makes it sound like they’re inventing nuclear weapons or one thing each bit as darkish and monumental. (Sometimes, an explosive underground hum will shake and rattle these mid-century-modern dwelling rooms.)
And the ladies? They keep residence, chatting and backbiting, cleansing home, taking care of the youngsters, hanging out on the pool, getting ready tuna salad and deviled eggs, taking ballet courses, and greeting their husbands with a drink on the door. You could survey all of it and suppose: What contemporary hell is that this? However “Don’t Fear Darling” hasn’t even gotten to the sinister half but. The identify of this surreal retro subdivision is Victory, and the primary factor everybody talks about is how fantastic it’s. How fortunate they’re to be there, and the way completely satisfied they’re to have escaped the life they’d earlier than.
Our entry level into the Victory way of life is a childless couple who look singularly interesting and in love: Jack, performed by Kinds with a healthful crafty that marks him as a pure display screen actor, and Alice, performed by Florence Pugh, who holds down the middle of the film with a spark of eagerness that melts right into a cautious detective’s gaze. These two can hardly preserve their palms off one another (early on, she clatters her dinner roast onto the ground, in order that Harry’s Jack can go down on her — a scene that ought to promote $5 million price of opening-weekend tickets proper there), and there’s an affection to their interaction. However is it actual? Is something we’re seeing actual?
The prefab neighborhood of Victory is run by a person named Frank, who additionally created it, and as performed by Chris Pine he has the character of a New Age cult chief — not a proto guru from the ’50s however a kind of smiling fascists of self-actualization, the type who can kill you with their delicate positivity. And, after all, the rationale for that’s that they’re by no means honest. They’re attempting to get one thing out of you. They’re “open” about every little thing however their very own agenda. Pine offers a tasty efficiency, however as quickly as Alice and Jack be part of the opposite residents for a celebration at Frank’s oversize home, it’s clear one thing deeply troublesome is at play.
The characters in “Don’t Fear Darling” have a cult chief as a result of they’re, in essence, a cult: contempo of us who’ve shaped a neighborhood through which they fake to stay like middle-class ’50s drones, and agree by no means to query something and to do exactly what they’re informed. Asking questions on what’s actually happening, the best way Alice begins to, goes to get you in bother. If the movie has a resonance, and bits and items of it do, it’s that we’re dwelling in a world as we speak that appears more and more assembled out of cult psychology: the de facto cult leaders (like Trump), the tribal mindsets that dictate a inflexible ethical absolutism, the retro fetishization of Nineteen Fifties values as a primal very best.
Alice, from the beginning, is beset by shock-cut hallucinations which are like Busby Berkeley numbers that flip into evil goals. And issues begin to occur round her. She pays particular consideration when Margaret (KiKi Layne), the one Black girl in Victory, stands on the fringe of Frank’s pool social gathering, aghast and distraught, and asks, “Why are we right here?” Alone on a trolley automotive, Alice watches a propeller airplane crash within the desert and runs out to see what occurred, going over to the placement no girl is meant to get close to: the Victory Undertaking headquarters, which sits atop a dust mountain like a Bond villain’s lair within the form of an enormous stripped golf ball. She returns wanting to inform everybody what she’s found, however she’s handled like Katherine Ross in “The Stepford Wives” or Mia Farrow’s Rosemary— like somebody who hasn’t been become a pod individual but. She’s additionally somewhat like Jim Carrey in “The Truman Present”: somebody who simply woke as much as the corridor of mirrors she’s dwelling in and due to this fact must be silenced. The sinister nerd Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons) is distributed over to drug her up. Her beloved Jack all of a sudden begins appearing like he’s…one in every of them.
In fact, when these different films got here out (even “The Stepford Wives,” which is an entertaining piece of claptrap), the world was rather less used to this sort of conspiratorial socio thriller. The early scenes of “Don’t Fear Darling” are the movie’s greatest, however even there it’s laborious to not discover the top-heaviness with which the film telegraphs its personal darkness. (It’s not like we watch Chris Pine’s speech and suppose, “What dude!”) To essentially work, the movie must reel us in slowly, to be insidious and shocking in the best way that “Get Out” was. As a substitute, it’s ominous in an apparent method.
However it does have a giant twist, which I’ll, after all, not reveal. I’ll simply say that it’s a mix of “Squid Sport” and Shyamalan, that it desires to spin your head however might go away you scratching it, and that it’s hooked to Harry Kinds being solid, for a spell, as a runty unattractive geek, which (shock) is just not precisely convincing. What is convincing is how simply Kinds sheds his pop-star flamboyance, at the same time as he retains his British accent and takes over one social gathering scene by dancing as if he had been in a ’40s musical. There’s really one thing fairly old style about Kinds. Together with his popping eyes, floppy shock of hair, and saturnine suaveness, he recollects the younger Frank Sinatra as an actor. It’s too early to inform the place he’s entering into films, but when he desires to he may have an actual run in them.
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