Tumultuous. Don’t Worry Darling has been doomed from the get go with its litany of offscreen drama. Did director Olivia Wilde hookup with Harry Styles? Did Shia Laboeuf get fired. Did “the spit” happen? Did Florence Pugh morph into her Marvel character and beat the sh*t out of the cast? Ok I made the last one up…ONLY the last one. Apparently you just have to wait 30 minutes and some new shenanigans will come to light. As an audience member though, all that you’re interested in is if the movie is worth your time. I guess life imitates art here, because Don’t Worry Darling is a hot mess, great one moment but really terrible the next. No wonder Shia Laboeuf was attracted to the project (zing!).
Don’t Worry Darling is a phrase Alice (Florence Pugh) would probably say to her husband Jack (Harry Styles) a lot. Welcome to 1950’s suburban America! We’re somewhere in the California desert at a place called Victory. Men like Jack, Bill (Nick Kroll) and Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons) go to work during the day at the “Victory Project” run by Frank (Chris Pine) who runs the project, making “progressive materials” for society. This leaves Alice, Bill’s wife Bunny (Olivia Wilde) and Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan) at home, drinking, shopping, and cooking the days away like the good housewives they’re supposed to be. After one of the wives, Margaret (Kiki Layne), has a breakdown, Alice witnesses what happens to her on the DL, and starts having these nightmares….that slowly turn into daymares…that make her do the unthinkable: start asking questions about what’s up with the Victory Project.
The first hour of Don’t Worry Darling is MUCH better than the last, but we’ll get to that in a second. Wilde the director does a decent job of injecting the seeming utopia of Victory with a pervasive, growing sense of dread. We start simple, with Victory looking like an Edward Scissorhands suburbia, a little too pristine and picturesque. As Alice’s hallucinations grow, the audience also starts to feel like its losing touch with basic reality like time and space, as the visions get more and more unsettling. While Alice’s struggles persist, Wilde smartly inserts a lot of language modern audiences will read meanings into, as the men – and even some of the women – around her tell her to “calm down”, or ask “did she really see what she thinks she saw?” or flip the title around to her, “don’t worry darling, everything will be fine. Just be happy” The movie is clearly leading to this confrontation Alice is going to have with Frank and Jack, as she demands answers to questions no one cares to answer. Despite the herky jerky ringer Alice is put through, Florence Pugh’s performance holds the movie together, giving a nuanced performance in the face of insistent storytelling. The scene when Chris Pine and Florence Pugh confront each other is Don’t Worry Darling’s high point, as the two best actors in the movie get a chance to show their chops.
And right after that high point, we come a tumblin down. Despite Florence Pugh’s herculean efforts to wrangle Don’t Worry Darling into submission, Olivia Wilde lets the movie slip away from her. Starting with Harry Styles. Hilariously, Styles admitted he “doesn’t know what he’s doing” when acting, and it rears it’s head in Don’t Worry Darling. Styles makes a lot of strange choices in the first hour that seem at odds with the story, and he hasn’t quite figured out how to modulate his emotions yet, either going big or really small, or emotionally confused most of the time. Wilde’s third act makes Jack the emotional lynch pin of the movie, and Styles just isn’t ready for that yet, which undoes any goodwill Don’t Worry Darling built. But the big sin is the movie’s big reveal and denouement. The movie’s plot twist is worst case scenario stuff: it’s not Earth shattering like Fight Club to make the movie legendary in a good way, and it’s not batsh*t insane like Serenity to make the movie legendary in a bad way. The twist is easy to see and coldly logical, landing Don’t Worry Darling like a thud, which enhances why the ending is so bad. After the reveal, Wilde jams in a flash back, multiple character resets, a lengthy car case, a fight, and multiple deaths in about 20-30 minutes. The movie flies in so many directions you can’t keep up, and not in a fun way, more in a frustrating way, because none of these big moments have any time to breathe and be reflected upon, as we need to get to project Victory.
I really hope Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t derail Olivia Wilde’s directing career. She proved she’s got something interesting to say with her first movie, Booksmart. Let’s hope she learned from the multitude of lessons this movie has presented her with, and she hit the reset button with her next film. I also hope Harry Styles really learned a thing or two from Florence Pugh as he gets ready for a Marvel run. And personally, I hope I get a chance to vacay with Pugh, the queen of the Aperol spritz!