Kinda Frustrating (SPOILERS)

I like this movie, but it's not great, and it's sorta frustrating because the potential is there for sure.

This potential is immediately evident in the cast - who are, with the exception of Harry Styles, pretty terrific - and the look of the film. The aesthetics, the vibe, the way it's shot - it's a good looking film.

The plot is pretty neat, too, and it went somewhere I didn't expect (call me dumb, but I didn't see the twist coming). Even if I did know where it was going, the journey was mostly neat and had some fun stops along the way.

My problems with this movie are basically that it doesn't push far enough in some places and it lacks the focus and attention to detail that would have really made it work. It wants to talk about feminism and how men control women, but the metaphor doesn't seem to be fully fleshed out. It's surface level. It doesn't dive in and make me see real life. It sorta makes me think, "Oh, yeah, the '50s were bad for that," but it's not as good at bringing it into a modern context.

Chris Pine's character Frank is weird. It's like they didn't know what to do with him. He's a cult leader, but his scenes have - my opinion - little impact. The dining room scene where Frank and Alice spar is very direct, very on-the-nose, and any cat-and-mouse games or power struggles they should have gotten into are just lost.

Other threads have pointed out the numerous plot holes, so I won't rehash them, but they are there. The attention to detail seems low. For example, the band at the big party clearly playing something other than Sing Sing Sing, which is blasting in the soundtrack. Or the doctor taking Alice's blood pressure without using his stethoscope. Or how Alice zones out and burns the steak and, to show this, they cut to the steak blackened in the pan. The top of the steak. She hasn't flipped it, but the top of the steak is burned.

The visuals, the performances, and the fun (if sorta cliche) plot all make the film fun to watch, but the plot holes, repeated basic errors, and lack of depth to the central metaphor make it frustratingly humdrum when it could have been really great.