A film review by Craig J. Koban October 19, 2022

DON'T WORRY DARLING

2022, R, 123 mins.

Florence Pugh as Alice Chambers  /  Harry Styles as Jack Chambers  /  Chris Pine as Frank  /  Olivia Wilde as Bunny  /  Gemma Chan as Shelley  /  KiKi Layne as Margaret  /  Nick Kroll as Dean  /  Kate Berlant as Peg  /  Douglas Smith as Bill  /  Asif Ali as Peter

Olivia Wilde's sophomore directorial effort DON'T WORRY DARLING has arguably gained - for better or worse...mostly for the worse - more unhealthy exposure and notoriety for the infamous behind the scenes drama that plagued its showing during last month's Venice International Film Festival, where evidence of one lead actor spitting on another during the premiere reared up as well as distracting gossip about the toxic working relationship between Wilde and her leading lady on set.  It was the entire talk of social media and with very little discourse being done as to the quality of the film itself.  

This, of course, begs two questions: 

Is DON'T WORRY DARLING a worthy follow-up for Wilde to her respected rookie debut in 2019's coming of age high school comedy BOOKSMART?  And was it worth all of the pre-release publicity?  

Nope...and nope.

Re-teaming with BOOKSMART screenwriter Katie Silberman, Wilde is aiming here to craft a nerve-rattling thriller that's many miles removed from her rookie film, and one that's pretty high concept to boot.  I would argue that DON'T WORRY DARLING certainly contains a limitlessly intriguing set-up and opening sections that harnesses its intended TWILIGHT ZONE-esque weirdness rather well.  But, boy oh boy, does this film hopelessly implode in its final thirty minutes with would-be shocking revelations that are not intelligently thought through at all.   

Plus, this is one of the best recent examples of a film that contains what I have coined a PWP - or a premise without payoff.  Despite its early strengths on a conceptual level, Wilde really drops the ball here when it comes to the unraveling of the central mysteries established within the story, which builds to a finale that had me literally throwing my hands in the air and incredulously whimpering at the screen "That's it?!  That's all you got?!  THIS?!"  No one, though, should lambaste DON'T WORRY DARLING on a technical level (it's gorgeously shot, contains superb production design and costumes, and has consummate cinematic crafting throughout), nor should most (emphasis on most) of the performances be marginalized, because they're quite good.  No, the major unapologetic sin that the film commits is that it has an awful lot to say about the frighteningly dark underbelly of grotesque misogyny and gender power dynamics, but has very little creative insight to following through.  It seems like DON'T WORRY DARLING lazily pilfers ideas from films as far ranging as THE STEPFORD WIVES, THE TRUMAN SHOW, PLEASANTVILLE and - as incongruent as it sounds - THE MATRIX, but without having much in the way of a definitive identity itself.  This is an endlessly glossy looking film that masks a very hollow heart. 

But, hey, it sure does start well.  Wilde does a good job early on thrusting us into the increasingly odd world of her film right from the get-go.  We meet Alice (Florence Pugh, working performance miracles with the material given), who's married to Jack (Harry Styles, not performing the same type of miracles) and both appear to be a faithful and loving couple in what looks like the 1950s desert community of Victory Project, California.  Something doesn't entirely look real about Victory right from the get-go; it seems less like a real town and more like something that's been meticulously fabricated, almost like from the pages of a department store catalogue from yesteryear.  It's perfect...almost too perfect.  And it's not just the appearance of the town, but also its other citizens, and they're all comprised of married couples.  All of the men wake up, kiss their eerily obedient spouses goodbye, get in their cars, and then proceed to their mysterious 9-5 jobs at Victory...and they all do so with pin-point symmetry together.  Perhaps even creepier is that the wives of this town are explicitly forbidden to never - and I mean like never ­- journey to the Victory headquarters where their husbands work.  It's strictly off limits to them...hmmmmmm.  Presiding over Victory and the town as a whole is Frank (Chris Pine), who has the soft-spoken and Svengali-like charm of a cult leader, and literally everyone in the town - including his wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan) - appears hypnotically attracted to his very greatness and influence.  Hmmmmmmm... 

Alice is a very loyal and compliant wife, doing everything in her power to keep her home letter perfect and clean while easily submitting to every sexual desire of her husband.  Things begin to crack for Alice and the idealized 50s utopia that she lives in when she begins to notice that Margaret (KiKi Layne) is acting very, very strangely and becomes unsettled with everyone and everything around her.  Most of the men (and other women, for that matter) dismiss her, but Alice becomes more curious by the day as to what's afflicting this poor woman.  When Margaret goes AWOL from Victory, Alice springs into action and begins to sense that something foul lurks underneath the pristine town and that it may not actually be a paradise after all.  She decides to make a pilgrimage to - yup - Victory HQ, which - yup - is forbidden, and upon reaching it she blacks out and later finds herself waking back up at home in bed.  She tries to confide in her husband and her BFF in Bunny (Wilde), but they all try to convince her that she's got some pesky bug and everything is fine.  Alice isn't convinced and starts to dig deeper, which very slowly and surely begins to unravel this community from the inside out. 

Again, Wilde succeeds in the introductory stages in DON'T WORRY DARLING, especially when it comes to just planting viewers very quickly within this time warped town, and without much in the way of exposition or backstory.  Is this actually a 1950s California town or some sort of recreation of one done today?  We don't know and Wilde doesn't immediately tip us off  either way, which is to the film's benefit.  But hints are dropped in here and there that speak towards this whole community being some kind of experiment.  Why is there no other town anywhere near this one?  Why are there what appears to be corporate branded Victory flags flying high over just about every street corner?  Why does this town's shuttle service never go outside of town limits?  What on earth do the men do at Victory that's so hauntingly hush-hush and can't be revealed to their wives?  Why do all of town's women come off as sex slaves to their husbands, succumbing to every one of their whims without hesitation and at the drop of a hat when they return home?  And why the hell are planes spontaneously appearing in the sky and warping in and out of time and space?  All of this build up of the inherent mysteries of this odd little microcosm is what gives DON'T WORRY DARLING some strong momentum for its first hour, not to mention that cinematographer Matthew Libatique baths this town in sumptuous pastel hues and Katie Byron's stunning production design and Adrianne Phillips' mouth-watering period costumes greatly assist in the world building here. 

And it's definitely compelling to see the once docile Alice begin to question her very reality in Victory, and her early paranoia starts to morph into full-blown terror when she comes to understand that all of these husbands and Victory's head honcho in Frank might be...well...not on the level at all.  All of this builds to a head when Alice has to confront Frank - during an excruciatingly awkward dinner party - and accuse him of committing some masterful gaslighting on her and every other woman in Victory.  Pugh is the emotional glue that keeps this film together, and she's as empowered as ever playing this very tricky part that has to teeter between calm spoken rationality and outright fear that borders into what everyone around her considers to be insanity.  And Pine is also really good here playing his ridiculously clean cut, perfectly coiffed, and tailored boss that's so cool, collected, and unnervingly focused that he comes off as the scariest kind of sickening snake oil salesman.  The other actors are along for the ride and following Pine and Pugh's lead, sans for Harry Styles, who absolutely looks the part of a 50s era twentysomething dreamboat with perfect hair and impeccable wardrobe, but he simply doesn't have the emotional depth or acting chops to stand convincingly toe to toe with Pugh through most of their scenes.  That, and they really don't share much in the way of sizzling chemistry that this film's story and premise demands. 

And going back to the very premise here, the longer the film progresses and the more we penetrate into the bowels of this rabbit hole of social horrors the less satisfying DON'T WORRY DARLING becomes.  Sometimes it has a lot to do with Wilde's distractingly idiosyncratic usage of weird soundscapes and even stranger disorienting hallucinations (mostly suffered by Alice) that sometimes grinds the film to a abrupt halt.  We get bizarre flashes of Busby Berkeley-styled dancers, extreme close-up shots of pupils, a piercingly heavy handed music score by John Powell, and with all of them on rinse and repeat throughout the story to the point of tedium.  The effect is to clearly disorient the audience and to match their disorientation with that of Alice, but it all becomes so aggressively suffocating.  The obtrusive style over substance directorial tricks that Wilde uses here doesn't compliment the film in any meaningful way, nor does she and Silberman thoughtfully or intelligently engage with what should have been compelling themes about male/female relationship dynamics and the horrifying extremes of patriarchal controls in a marriage.  I think the core message here is that the vision of the 50s as a perfect and blissfully idealized time of marital bliss is pure hogwash because of how tyrannically unbalanced it was.  DON'T WORRY DARLING's messages are worthy and noble, to be sure, but the makers seem to struggle with extrapolating what they want from them...and when they do it's methodically hammered home without much nuance or subtlety.