Is "Don't Worry Darling" Giving?

A review.

Amid the media frenzy surrounding Don’t Worry Darling, a clip of actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde’s 2019 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert went viral. Promoting her debut feature film Booksmart, Wilde remarks with a smile: “If a movie’s bad, it is the director’s fault.”

yuktha @suesateIIites

the reviews for dont worry darling all being bad seems like a fantastic time to bring this back

The clip added fuel to the flame of online attacks on Wilde. The internet, because it inherently hates women and particularly those who date Harry Styles, wished for Wilde’s downfall. It circulated negative reviews of Don’t Worry Darling with glee, and hoped for Wilde to turn out as a bad director who made a bad movie.

Don’t Worry Darling is, for the most part, not bad. It’s certainly stylish and compelling in its setup, thanks to its superb production design, meticulously choreographed sequences, and Florence Pugh’s performance. But it gets tedious through the halfway mark, and culminates in a twist so ridiculous and vapid that the film loses its luster within minutes.

It’s the 1950s, and housewife Alice (Pugh) lives an idyllic, romantic life with her husband Jack (Styles) in a utopian community she’s barred from leaving. Jack works at the mysterious “progressive materials” company the Victory Project under its charismatic leader Frank (Chris Pine), but Alice begins to worry that it’s all a facade.

Florence Pugh and Harry Styles in Don’t Worry Darling

Wilde’s direction, with the help of Matthew Libatique’s cinematography, shines in creating the uncannily perfect Victory community. The ordered dance of classic cars leaving their driveways every morning is a joy to watch, as are the controlled ballet sequences over which Frank’s wife Shelley (Gemma Chan) recites: “There is beauty in control, there is grace in symmetry, we move as one.” The film’s ensemble scenes and action sequences are gripping, particularly a dinner party gone wrong later in the film.

The film is also full of unique imagery—a plane crash, eggs without yolks or whites—that indicate the tightening suffocation of the community. Don’t Worry Darling sees Wilde honing a style of putting psychosis to screen that she previously dabbled in with Booksmart and the short film Wake Up. Alice’s descent into madness is represented with jarring cuts to eerie visuals and immersive sound design, and while heavy-handed at times, it shows a promising artistry that could thrive if put to the right project.

The film’s constant insinuation that something darker lurks under Victory’s surface gets tedious very quick. It spends so much of its runtime peppering in creepy staring and heavy breathing to tease a revelation, that when it finally arrives, the viewer has either already stopped paying attention or wishes they did. The twist is so unfounded and unearned that it undermines the film’s merits, making the past two hours amount to little more than a waste of time. It’s hard to see how even the most skilled director would salvage this script. Perhaps they would’ve avoided it altogether, but even Spielberg made Ready Player One.

At least the film gave us some good performances. In addition to Pugh, Wilde gets gripping performances from Pine, who plays the cultish and magnetic villain in a departure from his previous roles, and Chan, his poised, stone-cold wife. Styles, though sufficiently dreamy in his first leading role, is never sure of who Jack is or how he should behave. This becomes distractingly pronounced when he shares the screen with Pugh, his performance bordering on parodical while Pugh embodies Alice with a moving, awards-worthy aptitude.

Wilde brands herself as a feminist filmmaker, but this film just barely scratches the surface in its examination of gender roles and female pain. Sure, it shows period-typical sexism: the wives, à la Mad Men, stay home, gossip, and are completely in the dark about what their husbands do at work. But Jack is no Don Draper—he is a loving husband, cooks Alice dinner when she’s tired, and prioritizes her pleasure over his own—which alone muddles any messaging about just how rampant misogyny was in the ‘50s. Perhaps there’s an allegory here about how Trumpian reactionaries yearn for the days when all women did was cook and look pretty. Maybe how the community deems Alice’s experiences “hysteria” represents a backfiring “believe women” movement, Pine’s character the patriarchy, Chan’s the women who are complicit. But you’d have to squint to see it.

All of Wilde’s work as director, which includes Booksmart and several short films, explore the lives of women who don’t quite fit in. She does so with empathy and sheds light on aspects of the female experience that are often reduced to juvenile emotions: crushes, breakups, friendships, internalized misogyny. But her feminism is rarely intersectional or challenging, and her work does little more than pointing a camera on the lives of these women. In a Vogue interview, Wilde described Don’t Worry Darling as “The Feminine Mystique on acid,” referencing Betty Friedan’s seminal book that sparked second-wave feminism. In reality, Don’t Worry Darling is more like a book report written by a teenaged boy who only skimmed the first chapter.

Don’t Worry Darling is a competent film, even compelling at times, that exhibits a distinct visual style and some strong performances. However, due to its underestimation of its audience’s intellect, its central mystery becomes insipid and its feminist message ultimately a case of misleading marketing.