LOS ANGELES — Olivia Wilde remembers driving to Palm Springs for the first time 20 years ago, taking in the Midcentury Modern architecture, the palm trees, the lush golf courses and the flowing fountains, a verdant city plopped in the middle of a desert. Every time the native New Yorker looked out the window, the same thought ran through her head: “If we settled Mars, this is what it would look like.”
“It felt like the ultimate expression of man’s dominance and power,” Wilde says over the phone, taking a walk around New York. “It’s so beautiful, but it’s also a really strange place. If not for all the creature comforts that man has created, you would die very quickly out here. And it’s the desert, so it’s spooky. I recall thinking that someday we have to make a horror movie out there.”
That day has arrived with “Don’t Worry Darling,” opening in theaters Sept. 23 after world premiering next week at the Venice Film Festival, a psychological thriller about a couple (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles) living in a utopian desert community called the Victory Project. It’s a place where men leave in the mornings in their vintage Corvettes and Pontiacs for mysterious jobs while the women stay home, make the beds, scrub the bathtubs and cook up a pot roast for dinner. The ethos, in the words of the community’s leader, Frank (Chris Pine), is all about mining “pure, unbridled potential.” That and hedonism. The women must keep the liquor cabinets fully stocked too.
