Keep calm and carry on. This phrase uttered by Dr. Collins (Timothy Simmons) is used in jest as a piece of advice for Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles), as the couple try to adjust to Alice’s increasing visions and warnings after witnessing a tragedy. You see these two have made the perfect life for themselves in a beautiful 1950s community and this tragedy has sent Alice reeling, forcing her to question the nature of her reality. While everyone around her is trying to keep her calm, Don’t Worry Darling is prepared to make her struggle, providing Alice with a series of challenging and near explicable obstacles moving the character and audience towards a baffling conclusion that left much to be desired.
Don’t Worry Darling has the unenviable task of being a movie hewing from previous films but trying to be a standard for a new era. The Stepford Wives and Get Out were two films that immediately came to mind as I was watching this film. Even if you had absolutely no knowledge of any previous film, the script written by Katie Silberman, Cary and Shane Van Dyke, lets you know early on that not all is perfect in Victory. Doing this in any script puts the movie on the clock, so to speak, in that we expect the film to inevitably reveal the charade and force the main character to make a decision. However, unlike previous films, this movie decides to cram in more plot and story than it has run time to handle, briefly touching on what are major issues while not engaging too deeply with any of the topics. The film is upfront about something seriously sinister is going on in the community and yet, the movie is mostly shy about delving into this past the main couple. Even when it is revealed what is going on, nothing lands because it doesn’t feel grounded in any kind of reality. What good are talking about concepts like patriarchy, societal woes, and mental health, if the movie doesn’t seemed concerned with really wrestling with and interrogating them? Don’t Worry Darling instead is a film that feels like nothing more than rehashed themes and some very clunky world building, leading the whole effort to feel incredibly uneven and climax unearned.
Olivia Wilde, as the director, is spinning a lot of plates in this movie thanks to the script. While she gets the most out of the genre elements of the story, her shot selection and pacing as the movie moved towards the climax left a kind of empty feeling. Wilde is able to frame the baser human desires and emotions in a visually interesting way, but it’s almost like she’s treating the different elements as separate movies. What Wilde wants to shine, does shine, as evidenced by the fact she manages to draw an intense performance from Florence Pugh and directs herself to arguably the movie’s best performance. Unfortunately, the other characters don’t so much as fade to the background as they are consumed by blankness. Only Chris Pine and Gemma Chan register amongst the other members of the ensemble and though Styles gives it his best, he becomes saddled with the movie’s lamest reveal and thematic entanglement.
Although there were some entertaining moments, Don’t Worry Darling is unfortunately weighed down by the many issues in the script and the questions it brings forth, but refuses to and can’t answer.