POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT.
It's the 1950s, that golden golden age of America, and in an undisclosed California desert location newly-weds Alice and Jack Chambers (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles) are living in a specially-built, company town in the headquarters of a super secret program called the Victory Project.
Each morning the husbands, all immaculately-dressed, set off in a range of immaculate classic 50s styled cars, while their immaculately made-up women folk wave them off from the front gardens of their immaculately maintained, ethnically diverse cul-de-sac. The men are all working for the Victory Project on a super-secret project involving 'progressive materials'. The wives live under one golden rule - 'Don't go into the desert' - spend their days as house-wives cleaning, cooking, shopping and looking after their husband's every need, arranging pool and dinner parties for their husband's boss, Harry (Chris Pine) and his wife Shelley(Gemma Chan).
The weather is always perfect, Alice and Jack are very much in love, and seem to have sex at every opportunity, and everything seems fantastically rosey in Alice's world. So why does she have niggling doubts, and why is she having strange flashes or weirdness, and why has one of her friends just killed herself and just what's out there in the desert?
Directed by Olivia Wilde, who also plays Bunny (Alice's best friend) this is good looking and well mounted movie with a very troubled production, which involved falling-outs, walk-outs, sackings, recasting, romance and reshoots.
The cast is excellent, particularly Florence Pugh, who carries this film, and Harry Styles shows he can do more than just sing nice. Likewise, Chris Pine in a supporting role, brings a terrific sense of menace and malevolence to proceedings. The production design is terrific, the costumes, the sets and the music are all note perfect, Wilde directs with determination and mounts it well, and yet all this is a given, it's the literal icing on the cake, because the proof is in the pudding.
This is a film that you know going into has to have a sting in its tail, a twist, a M. Night Shamalama-ding-dong moment, if you will, upon which the entire edifice, like a house of cards, has been precariously built. But will it be worth the 123 minutes running time wait to get to, or will you somewhat groan having sort of guessed what was going on well before the end.
The secret at the end of this just about works, although you'll be left with many unanswered and somewhat frustrating questions. It shouldn't come as any surprise to learn that the plot of this film, is fuelled by masculine toxicity and is a reworking of the classic 1972 SF thriller The Stepford Wives, although with a 21st Century wrinkle in the reveal. There are hints of something else going on at the edges of the story, a sense of intrigue, but these are never developed any further.
It works because Pugh gives it her all, she really carries this film and her relationship with Wilde is superb, but sadly it fails because it's a tad too obvious. When you are finally told what's actually going on it's all a bit too 'ooh' when it should have been 'Oooooh my god!'
It's certainly not dull, it looks good, actually it looks great! The wind-up to the knock-out punch is exciting and gripping, but sadly it ultimately fails to land a knock-out punch and overall feels just a little too on the button for its own good.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments, unless they're how to make money working from home, are gratefully received.