Formula: The Stepford Wives + Serenity
If you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.
God, wouldn’t it be fun if I just left it at that? Unfortunately, Don’t Worry Darling is the kind of trainwreck that you can’t help but look at. There are failures that just bum me out and bore me. Then there are the failures like Don’t Worry Darling that leave me with so many questions that I can’t put it down.
You may recognize Don’t Worry Darling as a curious art exhibit at the Venice Film Festival portraying A-list stars in a disastrous press tour, but it turns out there’s a movie attached to it too. It’s a movie about Florence Pugh as a housewife, Alice, in an idyllic 50s community who starts to think that something isn’t right. She begins to question her husband’s (Harry Styles) mysterious job with something called the Victory Project. She notices how isolated the community is, how they can’t leave, and how strange it is that locations are off limits. This is set off when a neighbor and friend, Margaret (Kiki Layne) starts acting out against the constraints of the town. It gets worse as she starts having strange dreams, keeps inexplicably humming an unfamiliar song, and sees a mysterious plane crash.
That the movie has a big twist (more on that in a bit) isn’t a surprise. The film has been advertised as a thrilling mystery box movie. Early on the film plays its hand that a big reveal is coming. I did snuff out where this was going pretty early since I’ve seen enough movies of its ilk. That didn’t immediately turn me off, but it did alert me to the high degree of difficulty.
Before its premiere, I had this film pegged as an Oscar hopeful. Pugh brings that kind of attention. While Olivia Wilde’s first effort as a director, Booksmart, didn’t quite lead to awards, it came with the kind of goodwill that suggested an appropriately ambitious project – and Don’t Worry Darling is ambitious if nothing else – would get a fair shake with the Academy. At its core, Don’t Worry Darling was never going to be clever enough to be an awards movie though. The commentary is far too surface level. What this could’ve been is a really great adult thriller. The kind that is less concerned with staying ahead of the audience and more concerned with its movie star performances.
There are many good parts of this movie. Florence Pugh continues to be a star. It’s a shame she couldn’t have been around in the 90s to have an Ashley Judd career. Whatever bad blood there may have been between Pugh and Wilde behind the scenes, it doesn’t show on screen. Chris Pine is astoundingly charismatic in a supporting role as the leader of the Victory Project. The film is packed with smaller performances that punch above their weight. Kiki Layne is the star of her own movie happening in the background of this one. Kate Berlant milks a lot out of reactions and one-liners. Gemma Chan in few scenes gives glimpses of a character with very complicated motivations. Honestly, I didn’t even hate Harry Styles’ performance. He’s given so many limitations thanks to the story structure that I don’t think others would’ve done much better. I keep hearing dream alternate casting coming from people who are also changing the writing of the character in the process. That’s not really fair. As written, no one can make his character a good character.
The film looks great. Location, costuming, and photography are all top notch. At the very least, Wilde surrounded herself with a crew who knew how to deliver a striking vision of the movie. A lot of the imagery in the film is haunting yet alluring. I came away from this still interested in her next work as a director. I do now know that she isn’t [yet] good enough to overcome a bad screenplay. Granted, for all I know, the screenplay as written made sense and she butchered it with rewrites and editing choices. I’m sticking with the optimistic and generous take.
I’ll remain vague about the twist here, but I will say the film has a fundamental misunderstanding of how to apply that twist. The later a twist comes in the movie, the more a filmmaker believes the film can sustain itself without it. The Sixth Sense is a good movie even if Bruce Willis was actually alive. That twist happens at the end because the movie works without it. That is not the case with Don’t Worry Darling. It tells us early on that something isn’t right. It doesn’t play fair with the clues. Certain early events go unexplained. There’s a dinner scene late in the second act that reveals major character information as a gotcha moment except that’s the first the audience is hearing of any of this. The other thing about twists is that the simpler the twist, the later it can go. That’s not a hard rule, but it covers most scenarios. In The Usual Suspects, the Keyser Soze reveal is clean and simple. It’s just a single character reveal. Willis being dead in The Sixth Sense is clean too. His living situation affects few characters and doesn’t require much explanation. Don’t Worry Darling’s twist, however, is a huge one that fundamentally changes everything. A twist that large needs a lot of time to explain itself. I think of a movie like Fresh from this year. There’s a big twist that Daisy Edgar Jones is drugged and abducted by her new boyfriend. That happens pretty early, because it has to spend a lot of time on the ‘why’ of it all.
Most bad movies are easy to forget. I watch them and they are generic in addition to being bad. Like, I remember I hated Need for Speed but I also can’t recall a single thing about it. Don’t Worry Darling is a bad movie that gives glimpses of a better movie. I don’t think it could ever be as smart as it wanted to be. Its message just isn’t as revolutionary as it thinks it is. But there’s a fun, even pulpy, thriller in this if it accepted that it was giving surface level commentary. As is, a lot of great on-screen work is wasted on a film that is more concerned with trying to stay ahead of its audience.
Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend
OK. The twist: it’s all a virtual reality run by incels. I find that twist incredibly tedious. It reminds me of my thoughts after seeing Antebellum and Alice: two films about white people secretly bringing back plantations so they can enslave black people again. Those movies bothered me because it suggested that this is what people thought racism looked like. Look, I’m not suggesting that there are no people who want to bring back slavery, but I’m pretty sure the problematic racism these days is more discrete. You could argue that it is making an extreme point as an entry point for those discrete issues. That doesn’t track though. Slavery isn’t the end goal of modern racists, so all the movies are doing is offering them an out by saying “I don’t see myself in these slave racists”. Less extreme, but Don’t Worry Darling has the same problem. A modern incel isn’t actually dreaming of a return to the 1950s. The idea is much more about being seen as a provider and wanting subservience. Don’t Worry Darling offers too much of an out for its target.
Also, the movie just doesn’t explain much at all. It is riddled with plot holes like what happened to the crashed plane and why the earthquakes. Ironically, Don’t Worry Darling assumes the victims (the wives) really did only live for their husbands before going into this virtual reality. Otherwise, wouldn’t real-world friends and family go looking for them? The logic of only men dying in real life when killed in the virtual reality sounds like an ad hoc change they made during filming when someone noticed a plot hole on set. To my earlier point, this is a twist with so many implications that you can’t reveal it so late and expect it to make sense. Maybe there’s a 400-page screenplay that explains this all perfectly. All I know is that some mix of screenplay and editing resulted in a movie that is overwhelmed by inconsistencies, plot holes, and questions.
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