It was a PR executive's dream: the film that, months before release, had already snowballed into an avalanche of headlines, each after the other sending the gossip machine into overdrive. The director and her lead were having an affair! There had been tension on set – no, an all-out screaming match!
The revelations were salacious, the receipts juicy. Instagram posts from the film's stars became crime scenes, every comment and tag meticulously dissected by online detectives to build a vague political map of the various alliances and snubs within the cast. You could practically imagine the red string flying haywire.
Then there was the Venice premiere.
Most of the cast sat through press junkets, while one notable exception conducted a very glamorous one-woman boycott – or so it seemed – with Aperol spritz in hand. Inane comments about filmmaking made the news; an eye roll to the heavens became an instant meme. Saliva may or may not have gone airborne.
All this to say: the tenor of Don't Worry Darling's release was nothing short of feverish.
If only it lived up to the glorious melodrama of its circumstances.
Like the discourse it has detonated – fuelled entirely by coded statements and hidden jabs – Don't Worry Darling also situates itself in a world of carefully calibrated relationships: the suburbs of 50s America, or an airbrushed approximation of it, with all the sheen of a paper-thin catalogue.
Its premise, at least initially, is compelling enough, if a little familiar: a variation on the suburban idyll-turned-dystopia helmed by a buzzy director – Olivia Wilde, whose debut feature Booksmart earned acclaim for its zippy take on the coming-of-age comedy.
Here, she turns her attention to the thriller, casting Florence Pugh (Midsommar; Little Women) and Harry Styles as Alice and Jack, a childless couple who are the picture of domestic bliss.
Alice is one of a cavalcade of perfectly coiffed women in tea dresses who while away their days buffing and scouring their houses to showroom perfection, or else sipping martinis and window shopping while taking impossibly chic drags from impossibly thin cigarettes.
Their equally cookie-cutter husbands, meanwhile, drive off to work each morning in sherbet-toned wagons and return to three-course dinners and expectant coos from their doting wives.
It's all perfectly anodyne – except, of course, strange rumblings soon emerge faster than you can say Stepford. For one thing, their pocket of suburbia – a prefab community called Victory somewhere in the middle of an unidentified desert – is beset by tremors that make their gleaming floorboards and verdant lawns quake underfoot.
"Boys and their toys," scoffs one of the women (Wilde, in a supporting role), waving off the shuddering disturbance with a titter.
Wilful ignorance, it turns out, is the mantra of Victory. A voice from a radio, always crackling in the distance, spouts empty maxims of progress and conformity.
And there's the ballet class all the women attend, less a dance lesson than an exercise in rigid synchronicity. "There is beauty in control. There is grace in symmetry," intones their instructor (Gemma Chan) like an evil yogi, the ASMR-like quality of her voice barely concealing a menacing snarl. "We move as one."
No-one is quite sure how they arrived in Victory; certainly no-one dares venture into the dusty plains surrounding the town which, with its harsh sunlight beaming overhead, is halfway between Joshua Tree and Arrakis.
The whole shebang is overseen by Mr Frank – Chris Pine's cartoon villain with a smirk permanently emblazoned on an ever-darkening face. He's the founder of Victory, we're told, and the leader of its new regime, upheld by vague promises of "changing the world".
As the film chugs along, careening through boozy dinner parties, company galas, and poolside soirées, Alice grows increasingly suspicious, plagued by hellish hallucinations of screeching faces and crowds of dancers whose limbs blur and merge into spidery formations.
These visions, especially when paired with John Powell's score – an alien chorus of moans and groans – are breathtakingly gruesome. So is a classic horror film trick where, on occasion, Alice and her mirror reflection detach from each other in a split-second jumpscare.
The problem is that these images remain just that: images, given little meaning.
Before long, the film – like its residents – falls into an anaesthetised routine, alternating listlessly between the sunny optimism of Alice's neighbours and her own macabre terrors.
Unlike its forebears in sinister suburbia – Blue Velvet, American Beauty, even The Truman Show – Don't Worry Darling is bizarrely lacking in any propulsive mystery, instead flogging again and again that this town is weird, as if we didn't get that the third, fourth, and fifth times we've seen Alice's nightmares play out on screen.
Pugh, to her credit, is typically excellent. Alice often feels like an alternate-universe Dani, Pugh's breakout role in cult horror Midsommar; in both films, she plays increasingly thorny characters driven slowly off the rails, marked by her signature downturned pout – that most base expression of anguish – as she's scorned and dismissed by all around her, including her own partner.
Alt-comedian Kate Berlant (A League of Their Own; Search Party), too, is scene-stealing and greatly under-utilised as the shrillest, most manic of the wives – a much-needed interjection of campy hyperbole amidst an incredibly self-serious film.
But these performances only widen the chasm left by Styles, who seems, more than anything, like stunt casting designed cynically for the box office. One longs for even an ounce of the pop star's real-life showmanship; here, he is a vacuum of charisma, unable to pull off the modulations required as his character shifts from a loved-up husband to a company man desperate to maintain the social order.
(Ostensibly billed as a lead, Styles often comes across as little more than set dressing – which is probably an insult to the production design, resplendent in the kind of mid-century furnishings only ever spotted on Pinterest boards.)
And for a film that has expended significant efforts in keeping audiences tight-lipped about its ending – its preview screenings came packaged with the awkward hashtag #DontSpoilitDarling – its final twist is hardly worth spoiling anyway.
Suffice to say it undercuts much of its preceding 90 minutes in mostly confusing, underwhelming fashion: a twist so contrived even M Night Shyamalan would disapprove.
As the film rushes to fill in the blanks – and there are many – it attempts a grand, contemporary manifesto on gender (and … Jordan Peterson?), but can only offer a bland political gesture that's as tiresome as the corny jokes about 'worrying, darling'.
Don't Worry Darling is in cinemas now.
