I remember the trailer to this movie piquing my interest a little bit – albeit not enough to actually put it on my list, but then my daughter, who'd watched it, spoiled the big reveal for me, it counter-intuitively made me wonder how it would handle the necessary twists.

We meet Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles), living an idyllic life in Victory, a sunswept Californian town straight out of a very idealised 1950s. The men all leave for work at the same time, driving off into the desert bound for some top secret research facility they can't tell their wives anything about.

While they're gone the women do housework, gossip, cook, beautify themselves and prepare for the return of their husbands, who they both serve and idolise. On Jack's first return to the house that we see, after Alice has made a sumptuous dinner, he actually sweeps it all onto the floor, lifts her up onto the table and starts giving her very enthusiastic (and enthusiastically received) oral sex.

And it's all presided over by Frank (Chris Pine), seeming to be somewhere between the town Mayor and the alpha male if they were all gorillas, apparently having founded the place, dedicated his life to keeping it functioning and everyone happy, and with his authority unquestioned.

Alice thinks she's leading a charmed existence with her doting husband and friends, but gaps in logic and weird occurrences start adding up. At one of the many garden parties held on Frank and his stoic wife palatial property, she sees another of their friends, Margaret (KiKi Layne), in a heated argument with her husband – the kind of domestic upset the town of Victory isn't built for and certainly doesn't allow behind the veneer of happiness.

Later, Alice is on the bus on the way to town (on a dusty road going through a completely empty and desolate landscape, a major clue things aren't what they seem) when a light plane in trouble goes down nearby, crashing into a mountain. Alice insists they stop and help but the bus driver wants none of it, seeming to be terrified of doing something unsanctioned.

So she goes off herself in case she can help, walking for miles through the baking heat and dust and eventually walking up a road spiralling up the outside of a mountain, finding herself on the top with a weirdly-shaped building that has no obvious entrance but an ominous air. When Alice touches one of the glass panels, she lapses into a fugue nightmare of dreamlike images.

Later still, things turn violent. She sees Margaret throw herself off her roof, obviously intending to end her life, but the creepy, secret police-like cleanup crew come and collect Margaret's body and everyone starts insisting to Alice that she must have just slipped.

It all combines to make Alice determined to find out what's up in Victory; why neither Jack nor any other husbands can tell their wives what they do for a living, why Frank's word is law and people who challenge him tend to disappear and eventually, why they can never leave.

The secret of Victory is hinted at in a few snippets Alice has when she's dreaming or out of it, but the script could have handled the reveal a bit better. Towards the end there's an abrupt scene change into that seems to be the present day where the pair live in a cruddy apartment, Jack is wiry, creepy and unemployed and Alice is an overworked ER doctor not the least bit happy with their relationship.

I won't spoil it with a single word like it was done for me, but (mostly negative) comparisons to The Stepford Wives are valid (but no, it's not about robots). It's actually more like an extended Twilight Zone episode.

What surprised me the most however was the negative critical response. It had its issues, but just like Greta Gerwig moved up a notch with Little Women , doing a lot more than just shooting people talking and wrangling real filmmaking crafts, Olivia Wilde has a fantastic eye for design, Victory looking for all the world like a paradisaical community with a 1950s aesthetic has been plonked in the middle of nowhere.

The script also teases out the secrets in the story well even though the final act flubs it a little bit, and I'm not sure what the critics who disliked it so much expected.