First things first: it was unfair of everyone on Twitter to mock Harry Styles – on the basis of a single out-of-context online clip – for his wonky and unconvincing transatlantic accent in this film. There turns out to be a reason for it. Unfortunately, that reason is part of a larger wonkiness and unconvincingness in this handsomely designed but hammily acted, laborious and derivative mystery chiller. Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.
The setting is 1950s suburbia, or some disturbingly fabricated alt-reality version of 1950s suburbia, a glitchless picture-perfect place for a satire on conformity and patriarchy. This is a gleaming new housing development in the Californian desert, with state-of-the-art homes for families and upscale professional couples; there are retail stores and a swish country club for tennis and swimming. And everyone works for a single company with the faintly Orwellian name “Victory”, which is also the name of the town. The firm does top-secret work which employees are forbidden to discuss, and the locality is periodically disturbed by crockery-rattling mini-quakes which everyone has learned to ignore. The wives have swallowed their anxiety and thus have a glazed, affectless expression, like the Valium addicts of postwar America or those mannequins in the fake nuclear-test “doom towns” built by the US government in the Nevada desert.
