123 min | R | September 23, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Alice and Jack have the perfect life in a perfect desert town where the men keep secrets and the women never ask. Then Alice starts asking. The premise is a loaded gun the movie forgets to fire.
Alice and Jack live in Victory, a planned community in the California desert built to look like a 1950s dream. The men drive off each morning to a secret project in the hills. The women cook, clean, and never ask what their husbands do. Alice begins to notice cracks in the perfect surface. Olivia Wilde builds the film as an allegory about male control and the comfort women trade their freedom for. The setup promises a sharp dissection of domesticity as a cage.
Florence Pugh plays Alice with total conviction. She makes the unraveling physical, in trembling hands and a stare that refuses to look away. Pugh carries scenes the script leaves half-written. Harry Styles plays Jack with a blankness that never deepens, and his big emotional turn arrives without weight. Chris Pine plays Frank, the town’s architect and guru, with a smooth menace that hints at a better film orbiting him. KiKi Layne plays Margaret, the woman who saw the truth first, and the movie discards her too early to matter.
Olivia Wilde directs with a strong eye for surface. The production design renders Victory in symmetrical lawns, matching sundresses, and mid-century kitchens scrubbed of any mess. The camera repeats motifs of mirrors, eggs, and tightening circles to signal Alice’s claustrophobia. These images announce their meaning instead of earning it. Katie Silberman’s script, built from a story by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke, sets an elegant trap and then explains it in a rush. The reveal lands as a download of exposition that flattens the dread the visuals spend the whole film building.
The result is a beautiful object with a hollow center. Wilde stages paranoia well and stalls the moment she has to pay it off. The film gestures at big ideas about agency and fantasy and commits to none of them. Pugh deserves the thriller the premise keeps promising. What she gets instead is a glossy puzzle that solves itself with a shrug. The seams Alice notices are the seams in the movie.