There should be a word for a surprise that isn't really a surprise. An unprise? A surplunk?
Whatever the word is, that's happening in "Don't Worry Darling," Olivia Wilde's follow-up to her terrific "Booksmart." It's a big pivot from that raucous comedy. "Darling" is a dystopian chiller in which the most intriguing flourish is that instead of falling in line with recent dystopian fare such as "The Hunger Games" or "Divergent," it's more like '70s failed utopias such as "The Stepford Wives" or the Thomas Tryon novels "The Other" and "Harvest Home." Instead of a controlling government being the enemy, it's friends and neighbors who seem to be out to get our protagonist.
She's Alice and she's played by Florence Pugh, the other big asset in "Darling." It's not a surprise to see Pugh playing a distraught person who gets trapped in an ominous, alien culture — perhaps you saw her do exactly the same thing in the superior, unsettling "Midsommar"? — but she's such an inventive performer and her casting is so against-the-grain that she makes "Darling" watchable.
