Don’t Worry Darling

When people first saw the trailer for Don’t Worry Darling, people were puzzled but thought it showed promise. The initial premise of a housewife discovering that her seemingly idyllic life is hiding something sinister has room to be successful, and with talented people attached like Florence Pugh and Chris Pine, a production design and visual style that appears to emulate a 50s suburban atmosphere, clear allusions to other popular works with similar themes and concepts like The Stepford Wives and Get Out, and with director Olivia Wilde proving herself decently capable with her directorial debut film, Booksmart, managing to win people over, it looked like a solid pitch. Too bad drama behind the scenes can be just as damaging as those in front of them. In the early 1950s-styled company town of Victory, Alice Chambers (played by Florence Pugh) enjoys her quaint suburban lifestyle of interacting with her fellow housewives, while the rest of the men, including her husband Jack (played by Harry Styles) spend their days working for the Victory Project in a surrounding dessert. Things start to get a little strange for Alice when a fellow housewife seems to go insane and try to kill herself in front of her, telling her that everything here is wrong. After that experience, Alice starts to pick up on the oddities of her town; how everything appears to be fabricated and fake, how mysterious things seem to happen outside the border of the town, yet she’s never allowed to question them, and how everything seems to stem from the Victory foundation headquarters, especially from its founder, Frank (played by Chris Pine). After everyone tries to convince her she’s crazy, including her husband, Alice decides to discover the truth about this isolated location for herself and why every housewife is being asked to ‘’don’t worry, darling’’. What could’ve been a film that hoped for Oscar buzz was instead met with mediocre reviews and rampant media controversies surrounding the production of the film. While still containing favorable elements, its no doubt that this film was eaten alive by those at the head of it.

Apparently Olivia Wilde was a popular name around the time that she green-lit this film as her next directorial movie became a bidding war against 18 studios, with New Line Cinema winning the rights. It appeared that the higher-ups had faith in Wilde after Booksmart and the initial trailer buzz and actor choices got people hopeful for where this film would go to. Sadly, the end result mixed with the controversies involving the issues that occurred between Wilde and Shia LaBeouf (who was initially cast as one of the leads), her apparent feud with Florence Pugh to the point where she didn’t want to help advertise the movie, and her supposed unprofessional nature on-set with her then boyfriend, Harry Styles that was happening during a divorce proceeding with her and Jason Sudeikis, really tampered the image of this film to the public. The bottom line is that these problems steeped heavy into people losing faith quickly in Wilde and the project and the movie on its own needs to be viewed adjacent to outside controversies, but even with that viewpoint, there’s still plenty of troubles to talk about. The premise had a good hook to it, and the slow, thriller-esque, almost Twilight Zone presentation and atmosphere helped build itself more than just a standard thriller with a hint of an artistic edge. There’s clearly talent put into this and enough references to classic stories that made this idea of repressing a minority to fit into an outdated lifestyle work previously like The Stepford Wives and Get Out, but what this film lacks as oppose to what those two sources do have is a stronger understanding of intellectual depth and nuance. Regardless of how you view Wilde’s previous work, its not the most complex material to work with (at least not in the realms that this is diving into), so this level of political commentary and social issues could maybe be handled from a satirical light-hearted manner, but from a serious thriller angle, it leaves a little to be desired. As a director, it feels like she captures half of the film relatively well, with decent pacing, enough sprinkles to confuse and not be 100% what you think it is, and a stable handling of the trippy weird visual cues to the point where it doesn’t feel overly pretentious (which is what it gave off in the trailers). However, the movie isn’t smart enough to properly capture the intricacies of what its trying to say, a majority of the commentary is fair in nature, but glossed over pretty quickly for what could be dissected, and the references to these sources feel more like exact takes rather than re-imagining them in her own way.

The cast for the film is not overtly star-studded, but most of them are at least recognizable names, and for a movie of this calibre with this type of tone and presentation, it feels like most of these choices were the right ones. Florence Pugh has won over a lot of people’s hearts recently with her work and she is no different here, easily carrying a good majority of the film on her shoulder’s as the lead and doing a very believable and effective job at playing this woman who seems to be content with her simple lifestyle until slowly devolving into a paranoid wreck who knows she’s being gaslit and is trying everything in her power to understand the situation and save herself. She has a fantastic grit and authentic charm to herself that she effortlessly carries in her moments, the cracks that form as she starts to discover the true horror of her situation is very enjoyable, and it’s a character you really want to root for and you want to see escape from this torment (especially when you realize the disgusting thing that’s actually going on). Also, Olivia Wilde as the best friend is surprisingly strong as well, actually managing to handle the comedic and even some of the more serious stuff surprisingly okay, and even some of the other wives like Gemma Chan and Kiki Layne do pretty decent in their bit parts as well. On the flip-side, her male support and love interest, Harry Styles, is so bad in this. Its clear right from the beginning that the only reason he’s there is because he was dating Olivia Wilde at the time, clearly having practically no acting ability in the least with awful line deliveries that never sound real, and clearly being outmatched next to a clear professional like Pugh to the point that its almost embarrassing. Chris Pine also feels miscast in this role as the head of the organisation; with a delivery and attitude that feels a little too underdeveloped to feel legitimate or distinct in character, and the movie wastes a potential connection between Pine and Pugh as when the two are confronting the other, its acted very nicely and the two do have good hero/villain chemistry, so something should’ve come from that.

The production design by Katie Byron for this film looks pretty authentic to the period its trying to replicate and from the various sets and houses on display, costumes done by Oscar nominated costumer designer Arianne Phillips and even to some extent the tone, it really does capture the feel of that era even though the dialogue and casting choices feel nothing like that. Its bright, bubbly, and inoffensive, but also small, cramped, and repetitive enough to give off the impression that something is wrong. The musical score by John Powell has its moments where it showcases the creepy, droning almost puppet-like situation the women are stuck in, but its very hard to ignore not only how minimal this specific score is utilized, but also how similar it sounds to other films with similar styles and themes (again, like Get Out). The writing for this film is arguably its weakest link, as it isn’t smart or thought-out enough to shoulder all the complex and interesting elements that can come from this premise and the eventual reveal. You would need someone that can find that disturbed comedy in the situation, but also truly highlight the bleakness of it as well, as even with Wilde at the helm, the movie doesn’t work that strong as a thriller, and it isn’t even trying to have anything comedic in it at all. With the head screenwriter Katie Silberman, who worked on Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart as well as rom-com films like Set It Up and Isn’t It Romantic,  and original spec script writers, Cary and Shane Van Dyke (the grandchildren of Dick Van Dyke) who are mostly associated with D-list mock buster films like Titanic II, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, Paranormal Entity, and Chernobyl Diaries, this is clearly a bad choice for this kind of movie. These choices not only don’t have the pedigree needed for this type of film, but even their choice of work isn’t within the same feel for what this movie required, and giving people a chance is fine if they prove they can pull it off, and these three didn’t.

Don’t Worry Darling destroyed pretty much any chance it had at earning Oscar buzz with all the craziness surrounding its behind-the-scenes production, but even taking that out of the equation, this film still has several faults shadowing over it to ever really escape from. On that note, the film did still have some good qualities to it and proved that even a messy handling of an otherwise stable idea can be salvageable if the people in front of and behind the camera have talent to work with, its just wasn’t pushed far enough to try fine tune it. Florence Pugh is a strong lead, the visuals and productions are nice and appealing, and there are nuggets of a good idea here that make it at least worth a watch, but some of the other failed performances, messy direction and an awful screenplay keeps things from really working as a whole. Nowhere near the shining star that was Get Out, but not to same level of pandering as something like the 2019 Black Christmas, the high hopes that people had for this movie just seemed too good to be true.