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★★☆☆☆
Don't Worry Darling is a film that has had a very interesting introduction into the world of cinema. A film with a troubling production, allegedly containing increasingly soap-opera style disputes like: petty mudslinging, affairs, casting disputes, and even Harry goddamn Styles “allegedly spitting at Chris Pine” (this one almost certainly isn't true; but it is funny). What a world we live in. But many films have overcome production troubles, to be regarded as masterpieces once finally unleashed. Apocalypse Now emerged from typhoons, heart attacks, script rewrites, and Marlon Brando behaving like a deranged toddler, as one of the greatest movies of all time. So does Don't Worry Darling accomplish a similar feat?
Nope. On the contrary, Don't Worry Darling is actually something of a stinker.
This is not an aggressively bad film. Don't Worry Darling doesn’t beat you over the head with its mediocrity in the way that other crappy films might. Instead, it insidiously, sneakily, constructs the blandest, most pseudo-intellectual movie you’re likely to see this year. It’s a film that rewards squinting; if you don’t really think about what’s happening, you’ll be met with lots of pretty shots, confronting imagery, and solid acting across the board. Think about the plot for ten seconds or more, and it collapses in on itself like a great big stupid house of cards.
Don't Worry Darling is a film in line with the types of fare you’d see from the Twilight Zone, or Black Mirror. We open with our protagonists Alice and Jack Chambers (played by Florence Pugh and Harry Styles), living in a cheesy, 50s, Americana-style company town called Victory. During the day, the men of the town go off to work at the mysterious Victory HQ out in the desert, while the women stay at home to cook and clean. As you can guess, something’s a little off with Victory. Alice’s friend Margaret recently ran out into the desert with her son (which is a big no-no), leading to his apparent death, as well as frequent outbursts from Margaret that “they’re lying to us” about the nature of the town. Alice herself then journeys into the desert, following a crashing plane, and sees something unexplainable.
From here, Alice slowly unravels, questioning everything about her life, the nature of their home, and engaging in a kind of passive-aggressive battle of wits with Chris Pine’s Frank, the founding father of Victory. It is eventually revealed that Alice, and many of the women in the town, are the unwitting prisoners of a virtual world of Frank’s creation. The men of the town aren’t leaving for work every morning, but returning back to the real world via some kind of portal; all the while the women are permanently plugged into the simulation a la the Matrix. Jack in the real world was an unemployed, long-haired, podcast-listening loser; Alice a doctor, working gruelling but rewarding hours. Oh, how the turn tables.
That’s the general plot summary for Don't Worry Darling. I’m not exactly sure where to start with this film, so what are the positives? The acting, as I’ve already mentioned, is decent enough, and even great at points. I’ve been a fan of Florence Pugh since seeing 2018’s Midsommar, and she’s predictably good here as the increasingly manically righteous Alice Chambers. Harry Styles is a capable enough actor too, despite what you might initially think, and he does a solid, if uninspired job as the initially well-meaning but eventually weaselly Jack. Chris Pine brings a creepy, douchey, frat-boy charisma to the villainous Frank and his medieval views on women. And as meaningless as it all turns out to be, there are some nicely-helmed shots throughout that generate a sense of unease, and the whole film has quite a nice, smart aesthetic to it.
I’m not someone who uses the word pretentious lightly, but there really is no other word for Don't Worry Darling. It operates under the pretence that it has these big, cool, complicated themes, and “has something to say” about gender roles and autonomy and patriarchy and relationships. It doesn’t. The film seems to constantly confuse observations for themes and messages. We have a flimsily-constructed sandbox world for director and star Olivia Wilde and writer Katie Silberman to explore, but the key messages we are left with are the very tepid statements of sexism being bad, and that…locking your spouse in a simulated world without her permission is bad. You might be thinking that there must be more to it than that, but that’s the great trick of Don't Worry Darling.
From the first shot of the film we are near-assaulted by flashy, well-shot, but over-the-top imagery surrounding the bright, plastically-perfect world of the man going off to work, and the woman staying at home. The first act really overstays its welcome, and takes far too long to get to the meat of the story, with some very unconvincing portrayals of happily married couples and drunk dinner parties. As Alice descends into paranoia, she herself is then assaulted by creepy visions and hallucinations of burlesque dancers, claustraphobic scenarios, and her friend Margaret being creepy. Actually, this is pretty much the bulk of the second act. It’s Florence Pugh doing her absolute damnedest to make these hallucinatory scenes engaging and weighty. Not only do these hallucinations not make a lick of sense within the context of the plot or the world of the movie, but they do absolutely nothing to enhance or build upon the themes. They vaguely give us the tactile sensation of feeling trapped, or overwhelmed, but other than that it’s just a string of ornamental metaphors, that are as empty and barren as Victory’s desert itself.
This is very obviously a film about toxic relationships and toxic, regressive men controlling women. But that’s just…what it’s about. It doesn’t bring a new take on these very real ideas, it doesn’t take us on a journey, or give us anything to think about. It truly does just give us a scene pack of sexism and gaslighting, look the viewer in the eyes, and say “this is quite bad, isn’t it?” It would be like watching a film about a serial killer, which has nothing to offer except the groundbreaking message that “murder is bad”. Don't Worry Darling is a puddle, it has no themes and it has nothing to say, other than using its characters and visuals to tell us that the things happening on screen are “bad”. It really is an empty shell of a film.
I’d say that the one admirable thing Don’t Worry Darling does is platform how these negative, regressive ideas, can organically grow in a modern society that should know better. But even then, this idea is woefully underdeveloped. We learn next to nothing about how Jack came to be this weak, manipulative character in the present day. All we know is that he’s a loser. The film could’ve explored this dynamic between Jack and Alice, how Jack’s fragile masculinity was clearly being challenged by his more powerful partner, and how this weakness led him down a darker path. But the film isn’t interested in exploring anything except the surface level; this would require exploring an actual idea.
Is it a crime to not have dense, complicated themes? Of course not, there are plenty of great films that have very simple plots and messages behind them. The problem with Don't Worry Darling is that it presents itself as being much more intellectual and poignant than it is. It meanders and drags its heels with a plodding plot by stuffing it full of these colourful visions and vignettes, that mean nothing. It’s fluff and filler masquerading as messaging. It’s honestly, upon reflection, a little bit insulting how much the film wastes your time with these nonsense segments, given the fact that they mean nothing and go nowhere by the end.
And again, they literally do not make any sense at all in the context of Alice. Why is she seeing visions of burlesque dancers? Why does she wrap her head in cling film? Why do the walls of her kitchen start to close in on her like something out of Adam West’s Batman? Obviously, it’s because “she’s feeling trapped”, but I asked why she’s having hallucinations in the first place, not “why did you write this into your screenplay”. I can assume it’s some form of loose PTSD, but these visions then disappear as soon as the plot needs them to and are never explained or elaborated on further; serving as yet another reminder of how Don't Worry Darling wastes your time as a viewer.
I compared the film to the Twilight Zone and Black Mirror earlier, but that is a very generous comparison to make. The actual, concrete plot of Alice uncovering the goings-on of Victory is dull. It is not an original story; the tale of “something’s not quite right with this place” is an old one in thrillers and sci-fi, and once again, Don't Worry Darling does absolutely nothing to make this unravelling mystery interesting. We have around an hour of sluggishly-paced hallucinations and gaslighting before Wilde plays her hand. The actual twist of the film in the final act, of Jack being a loser on the outside world and essentially holding his wife captive in Andrew Tate’s simulated utopia, is fairly engaging in a surface-level way, but it’s not exactly rockstar science-fiction. It is merely, momentarily, fine.
But yet again, what does Don't Worry Darling say about this turn of events? Zilch. Nada. Jack begs Alice for forgiveness and says that he did it all for her, before inexplicably trying to strangle her. For a film trying to celebrate the autonomy and power of women, we don’t even get a scene where Alice gets to decide her own fate. She is simply clumsily written into having to kill her husband in self-defence after learning the truth. The argument they have before this is adequately performed, but desperately shallow. Jack states why he did what he did, and Alice points out the obvious; that what he did was wrong, and that he stole her life from her. And then she kills him. The whole film is (ponderously) building towards this moment of ultimate betrayal, and instead of something actually engaging, we get stilted dialogue and a bonk on the head for Jack. What should have been the emotional and narrative climax of the film is underwritten, and sidelined by a ridiculous car chase scene that has no business being in a film like this.
And then, as Alice makes a mad dash for the desert portal back to the real world, again, in a car chase lifted straight from Looney Tunes, the shambling corpse of Don't Worry Darling makes one final, limp-dicked grasp for meaning. Back in Victory, after hearing of Jack’s death and Alice’s escape, Frank is murdered by his wife Shelley, who utters the line “It’s my turn now”. So I have a few problems with this line and scene. For one, Shelley had been presented to us as being incredibly supportive and in sync with Frank throughout the film; his partner. This plot twist truly comes out of nowhere, and not in a satisfying way, but rather in a “this doesn’t make any sense” way. She kills him for next to no narrative reason that I can think of.
Thematically, this is also a catastrophic line of dialogue for any film trying to sound coherent or even intelligent. The only themes this film has been able to dredge up for itself, are the ones of regressive, simulated prisons being bad, and regressive sexism being bad. What exactly does “It’s my turn now” mean? Is it now Shelley’s turn to run a fascist virtual prison camp and keep the men and women trapped there? Are the women going to now “go off to work” and leave the men plugged in to the simulation at all times? This is a feminist film, but the way this line is delivered and presented, as though it’s some kind of girl boss moment, is just sad. It feels like the writers have completely misunderstood their own themes in a very cheap way.
If Don’t Worry Darling did anything right, it was to convince me that a simulated world where one partner holds all the power, doesn’t work. Is immoral, even. And yet with this one single line, apparently it’s not; it’s actually all in the execution. Let me have a go, I’m sure I can make this Orwellian nightmare work! In two hours and three minutes, this movie could only come up with two pitifully weak themes, and then this one line proves that Wilde can’t even stick to them coherently. It is a bafflingly shit line of dialogue, and will probably go down as one of my least favourite individual lines of the last few years. I truly don’t know what they were going for.
So, is Don't Worry Darling worth seeing? It avoids being one star for Pugh’s performance and the overall look, but personally, I found it to be an insufferable, hacky, trite, bloated, and feeble attempt at filmmaking. It uses very complicated ideas like patriarchy, sexism, and toxicity in relationships, to prop up a mediocre psychological thriller with nothing of note to offer. It plods along at a snail's pace, showing you dull and uninspired hallucination scenes, before eventually vomiting up some clumsy exposition, self-immolating with one particularly atrocious raspberry of a line, and calling it a day. Harry Styles fatefully told the media that Don't Worry Darling is a “go to the theatre movie film”. He was lying. Don’t bother.
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