Don't Worry Darling (2022)

No one can know what an intimate relationship is like from the outside. When friends or family members get divorced, someone always acts surprised. “I never saw it coming,” they say with misplaced incredulity. Even among the closest friends, there’s a sizable chasm between what an outsider sees between two people and what that connection is like in private. 

One of the elements I appreciate about Don’t Worry Darling, the new film from director Olivia Wilde, is that it willfully subverts this idea. The tight suburban world of Victory, suffocated on all sides by a deadly desert landscape, is predictable and familiar; it is the domestic sitcom sandbox Wandavision played around in where roles are clearly-defined and everyone waves in synchronized motions around the cul-de-sac when the hubbies leave for work and the wives buckle down for a day of cooking and cleaning. We are supposed to know what those marriages are like on the inside because they are archetypes we know.

But, of course, knowing what is happening inside leaves us uneasy. We aren’t supposed to know about the passionate love-making sessions Alice (Florence Pugh) has with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). We’re not supposed to believe such chemistry is possible! It is so perfect that we immediately question it, particularly while taking in an immaculate world that is an anachronistic terror of perfection, not unlike Pleasantville. Tension grows while we wait for Alice to catch up with us and finally question the apparent unreality of her heavenly, if decidedly antiquated, world. Punctuated by a haunting score full of musical throat-clearing and stomach-churning lines that sound sugar-coated by repeat and syncopate in grotesque and unnerving ways, the film urges Alice forward until she is literally trapped between a wall and a glass door and on the verge of suffocating under the weight of questions she has somehow failed to answer.

While Alice begins to question whether she, from the inside, truly understands her own marriage, the world around her grows increasingly sinister. A former friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) appears at lavish celebratory functions with dead eyes and claims of rampant lies. The optimism of best friend and doting mother Bunny (Wilde) clashes with the creeping, self-important guidance of development organizer Frank (Chris Pine) whose wisdom fills the airways between fun little fifties hits. We see a cult of sorts, or maybe aliens—the bizarre monolithic mountain the husbands enter for work each day certainly leans that way—but only Alice seems willing to confront it, and confrontation has costs.

If this all reads like glowing praise, it is: I really do admire what the film did well. Nothing here is truly new territory—you get shades of Luhrman’s Great Gatsby cocktailed with some Black Mirror vibes and a healthy note of Shymalan and the aforementioned Wandavision—but the construction that we see on film is powerful. Pugh elevates this even further, once again excelling at the center of emotional torture porn; for every moment when Styles doesn’t quite get there with the emotion of his Jack, Pugh nails three others with an intensity that confirms her dynamic abilities as a leading woman.

But, like everywhere in Victory, what meets the eye doesn’t quite match what gurgles under the surface. Don’t Worry Darling is so on the nose at times—the trailer scene of Pugh wrapping her face in plastic wrap meets a moment where her marriage is, would you believe, suffocating her—that the presentation borders on condescension, but the film is also so packed with characters and threads and ideas that it can’t possibly pay them all off. Without spoiling anything, for instance, there’s a high-intensity scene with Gemma Chan playing infallible Frank’s wife that plays on-screen with gravity matching the richest moments of Alice’s…but why? We’ve seen Chan in only a handful of scenes; our profile of her character runs directly counter to her actions here. The entire moment is a miscalculation—either that pr evidence that many embiggening elements got chopped from the final cut (I could believe this).

But this isn’t an isolated incident: the film is so dense with ideas that I had trouble tracking all of them. Foreshadowing lands flat; explanations work but under the weight of blunt reveals that again show so much that I worry Wilde and her writers think we are idiots incapable of internalizing nuance. The message of Don’t Worry Darling is unsubtle, which is fine, but in the place of a meticulous script is one with dozens of shiny things and ideas that Wilde goes out of her way to point to, only to leave to rust off-screen when we finally are sponged our answers.

I liked Don’t Worry Darling—there’s too much good stuff here with too much Pugh excellence to hate what is an aesthetically strong, well-made movie. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it despite its many unoriginal elements. It carried a potency throughout its runtime: maybe it was Pugh, maybe it was the similarity to Wandavision, or maybe it was the unbearable tension it gripped me from the moment the film began with raucous disorienting dialogue among six people spilling on top of itself. Hell, maybe it’s that I’d gone exactly two movie theater-less months since seeing Nope on opening night in July. (Or perhaps it’s the tabloid-level drama that had plagued the film’s promotion but kept its title in front of me for weeks.) Whatever the case, I have a definite affection for this film…I also know that it squanders a ton of potential by trying to do too much and insisting so hard on beating me over the head with a message and themes I’m already on board with.