Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is arresting, dramatic, and ultimately disappointing. The scenario is breathtakingly Stepfordian: 50s picket-fence happy families, with Rick Nelson and his peers crooning and doo-wopping away. The aesthetics are breath-taking, the desert backdrop a surreal setting for this micro-world of gorgeous cocktail dresses, colourful convertibles, and glamorous couples. Tellingly, the wives busy away home-making, while the husbands drive off to Victory Project Headquarters. The sumptuous production design, by Katie Byron, receives stellar treatment from Matthew Libatique’s cinematography and Affonso Gonçalves’ electrifying editing.

The overall effect is to render the fake world of ‘Victory Town’ highly alluring. But this is a cult. The whole Victory Project hinges on the undeniable charisma exuded by Chris Pine as Frank, with the glacial Gemma Chan as wife Shelley. This pair are toned, glossed, and capped to embody all-American perfection – too smooth by half.

We are bound – post-Stepford – to recognise these preened, sun-kissed lawns and model households as parodies of the American Dream peddled in the consumer boom years of the 1950s & 60s.  Director Wilde, and writers Carey and Shane Van Dyke and Katie Silberman, seem to be taking us towards identifying Victory Town as a hateful archetype, a grotesque period festival of unequal gender relations. It seems misogyny and toxic masculinity might be the eventual targets.

But no. The film seems so obsessed with the recreation of the design and aesthetics of its world that we don’t really get beyond these. It is all visually mesmerising; full of striking bird’s-eye shots of coffee-pouring, food-frying and groups dancing. And those dresses, those cars! The visuals seem to merely reinforce Frank’s mantra of symmetry, order, progress – the film lacks any clear indictment of rampant consumerism, or the delusions of advanced capitalism.

The same superficiality applies to the frequent montages. Busby Berkeley-esque circles of high-kicking dancers evoke earlier concepts of style without substance. And speaking of style, Harry Styles manages to deliver important lines as Jack Chambers – a rising star in this world of tans and sequins – with absolutely no hint of nuance or depth. Don’t Worry Darling is a step too far for his acting.

But the film is undeniably a triumph for the magnificent Florence Pugh. She excels as protagonist Alice Chambers, her narrative arc both familiar and at times confusing. Alice’s courage in challenging her cultish surroundings brings inevitable conflict, leading to a dramatic if muddy climax. A different spin on the old trope of something rotten lurking behind the white picket fences, Don’t Worry Darling is perhaps more akin to the psychological drama of The Truman Show, than to The Stepford Wives’ inequality agenda.

Screened at Eden Court Cinema, Inverness