In Olivia Wilde's trouble-in-paradise thriller "Don't Worry Darling," Florence Pugh plays a devoted housewife called Alice, a common enough name that here evokes a few famous antecedents. Watching her go about her daily routine — cooking every meal, cleaning the house from top to bottom and venturing into town for the occasional grocery run — you might be reminded of Alice Kramden. That's true even if Pugh's Alice seems to inhabit a brighter, comfier (if less funny) vision of 1950s domesticity than "The Honeymooners," one that's awash in midcentury modern splendor and sits at the end of a picture-perfect desert cul-de-sac. It helps that Alice has a husband, Jack (Harry Styles), who's more or less the anti-Ralph, and not just because he thinks nothing of sweeping the dinner plates aside and treating his wife as a tabletop amuse-bouche.
After a while, though, you might be reminded of a very different Alice, the one who finds herself adrift in a strange, often sinister land where everything and everyone is a surreal imitation of life. And Pugh's Alice, at first cheerfully accepting of the status quo, soon starts asking dangerous questions. Who exactly is Frank (a silky-smooth Chris Pine), the combination corporate boss, town mayor and cult leader who exerts such a hold on Alice and Jack and the other couples living in this sunbaked utopia? What is the nature of the Victory Project, the top-secret government enterprise that employs Jack and the other husbands on their block? The answers threaten to push Alice through the proverbial looking glass, whether she's beholding a nightmarish vision in the mirror or cleaning a large window that suddenly closes in on her, underscoring her entrapment with an all-too-literal thud.
And "Don't Worry Darling," for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie. Directed by Olivia Wilde and written by Katie Silberman (from a story credited to Silberman, Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke), it's a handsomely assembled, increasingly transparent thriller that stomps when it should creep and drags when it should accelerate. Mainly it reminds you of the many earlier, better pictures it consciously resembles; I'm loath to name too many of them and risk spoiling the story's meager surprises. Suffice to say that Wilde and Silberman have conceived what often plays like a Palm Springs-shot derivation of "The Stepford Wives," or perhaps an old Douglas Sirk melodrama by way of "The Truman Show."
