DON'T WORRY DARLING

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

There's something rotten at the heart of Victory, a small too-picture-perfect-to-be-true desert township that's home to all the workers and their families. It's some unspecified point between the mid-50s and early-60s: everyone looks fabulous, lives in fabulous houses and drives fabulous cars. In this patriarchal paradise, the wives dutifully do all the domestic work while the men go off to their unspecified work on the top secret Victory Project, about which no-one asks and no-one speaks beyond the meaningless phrase "progressive materials". Alice (Florence Pugh) is starting to have hallucinations or strange visions - including a chorus line from a Golden Age musical - and becomes convinced that there's something badly wrong with the world, especially when one of her best friends suddenly kills herself in front of her and she's repeatedly told by her husband Jack (Harry Styles) that no, darling, it was all just an accident and you're imagining things.

So is it something like The Stepford Wives, with all the perfect and loyal wives happily subservient to their husbands and the Project? Is it something like Jacob's Ladder where it's all taking place in the mind of someone on the point of death? Or is it all just a dream? My guess at the film's Big Secret was wrong, but it was pretty much just as valid as the Big Reveal they went with. The key to Don't Worry Darling, really, is that payoff: whether you feel the What's Really Going On destination is worth the journey. Personally I'm not entirely sure, though their chosen solution has a particular cruelty and horror about it. To be honest I found myself wallowing in the wonderful period detail and interior design a lot more than the paranoid thriller plot, and I suspect the film was as well: it's a scratch over two hours and it really doesn't need to be.

Musically it's quite interesting, with John Powell's score mixing a conventional soundtrack with distorted and processed voices, though it's all shot through with numerous pop songs of the period and I could quite happily never hear Sh-Boom ever again! Pugh and Chris Pine (as Frank, the Victory visionary in charge of everything) are perfectly good, Styles less so. If you can ignore the controversy about why and whether Shia La Boeuf quit or was fired before filming (and director Olivia Wilde, who also has a supporting role, is/was in a relationship with Styles, who replaced him), and the unanswered questions such as where the biplane came from, it's a solid three-star film and I enjoyed it enough. But I did leave the cinema feeling slightly short-changed as that Big Reveal provoked "oh, okay" rather than "oh, wow!".

***