Big Idea

• Olivia Wild acted, directed and produced
• A planned community in sunny California has sinister underpinnings
• Plenty of star power, but does it deliver?
• Deserves the R rating
• Read more...

Impressive cast, ‘interesting’ movie

"Don't Worry Darling" has two of my favorite actress, Olivia Wild, and Gemma Chan. Chris Pine, lately and very successfully as Captain Kirk, has a crucial role. But the film has British actress Florence Pugh as the central character and pivot point. Now I can say the movie has three of my favorite actresses.

Besides playing in the film, multi-talented beauty Olivia Wild also directed the movie. Not to stop there, Wild also produced the film. Katie Silberman wrote the script. She and Wild worked together on another Wild-directed film, "Booksmart." Wild directed, and Silberman wrote that successful if small, film. Silberman also helped produce "Don't Worry Darling.”

The story informs us that in the 1950s, a mysterious corporation built a 'planned' community called Victory in sunny California. Pugh and her husband, Harry Styles, live there. Styles works for the corporation and his boss, Chris Pine. But beneath the utopian surface, something sinister lurks. The slow reveal of the mystery of Victory makes the body of the film.

It works too. Things get stranger and creepier, and Pugh, the at-home wife, gets more and more suspicious that things are not as they seem. Florence Pugh is an incandescent image on the big screen. She has what they used to call 'it,' that unlabeled something that makes it impossible to take our eyes off a movie star while she is on screen. Chris Pine brought what might be a career-best performance as the malevolent mastermind of the Victory project.

And it works up until the last part of act three. There we get the reveal, several different reveals, in rapid-fire order. By then, it is too late to do much prep work, and we, in the seats, have the feeling that they duped us and gave us the old switcheroo.

Wild, as a director, did excellent work, and I am sure the film will make enough money that she will make more movies in the future. She and her fellow producers spent about $30 million on the project, an amount not impossible to recover eventually. Wild is worth some $25 million, so I guess the movie doesn't need to make a lot of money to still be fun for her.

"Don't Worry Darling" runs for a long two hours and two minutes. This R-rated movie (sex, violence) gets a sub-par two sawblades, but I am going to bump it up to three because of the roles provided by Pine and Pugh and the deliciously eye-pleasing direction by Wild. This is a movie we might call 'interesting' rather than fabulous.

Odd fact-In her previous stint as the director of "Booksmart," Wild cast her then partner Jason Sudeikis with whom she has two children. In "Don't Worry Darling," she cast her current paramour, Harry Styles.

Good news for movie fans. Next year Florence Pugh will play Princess Irulan in the eagerly awaited "Dune: Part Two.”