It’s a thriller featuring a highly stylized look, by way of the late 1950s-early 60s, and the lead performance by Florence Pugh almost saves the day, but even she, as perhaps the premiere actress of her generation, can’t quite manage drag this mess out of a place of immense boredom. The drama involving the cast that took place around the film’s Venice festival debut, was far more interesting than the actual movie.
What Goes On
Pugh’s character, Alice, and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) live in a modest home in the desert company town of Victory, nestled somewhere between Nevada and the Pacific Ocean, with mountains in the distance and palm tree-lined streets. ’62 Corvettes abound.
Alice is thrilled to be a ‘50’s type, stay-at-home, cook-and-clean wife, making her husband dinner while dressed in ’50’s haute couture, and being physically delicious to the point where, although ravenous for the steak she made, he’d would rather sweep the dining table clean and have, er, marital relations on it, instead of steak. Jack seems to have the job of his dreams working for, well … that’s classified information.
Something’s Rotten in the Town of Victory
Soon enough doubts creep in. The community is overseen by a tech-y cult leader named Frank (Chris Pine) by way of Keith Raniere. Where do all the husbands go when they leave for work every morning? What’s going on at headquarters, way out there in the desert? Where did the men in red coveralls take Alice’s friend Margaret (KiKi Layne) when she tried to warn everyone?
Day terrors in the form of walls closing in and hallucinations such as cracking eggshells only to discover they’re all empty start up for Alice, and she feels her mind slipping away. Her search for answers result in isolation from the community and a confrontation with bossman Frank may lead to an excommunication from Victory (or worse).
Who Cares?
The answers, when they arrive, are deeply unsatisfactory. “Don’t Worry Darling” doesn’t leak air slowly; it blows like a tire that shouldn’t have passed inspection; the climactic reveal is ridiculous and heavy-handed.
Basically, the problem here is that, a la “The Stepford Wives,” this is a rant against the patriarchy. These “poor” women are expected to do the chores, shopping, cooking, and keep the husband sexually contented. This was absolutely a choice for a lot of women back in the ‘30s, ’40s, ‘50s, ’60s, and even ‘70s. And many feminist, successful career women are now looking back and wishing they’d done exactly this. “Don’t Worry Darling” presents all of the above as a hellhole, but director Wilde can’t get past the fact that not every woman has ambitions outside of the home.
In the production notes, writers and executive producers Carey and Shane Van Dyke reveal that the story “really came after browsing through old 1950’s advertisements, many of which paint a picture of an ‘oh so perfect’ patriarchal society, with women there to serve their always-smiling husbands. Suddenly, the world depicted in those ads became a very terrifying place in our minds, especially for a woman, and we knew we had to find a way in and explore through the lens of a psychological thriller.”
What? To a lot of women, life as a company wife in Victory looks fairly delicious. As long as the housewife-ry is based on love of husband and helping to make a lovely world for themselves to enjoy together—some women don’t see an issue here. The problem is that not enough thought is given to the why, the how, and the what happens next in all the shenanigans in Victory.
And then, as the credits roll, one realizes a litany of unanswered questions remains, from the recurring imagery of synchronized swimming beauties arranged in a circle and juxtaposed with a close-up of a human eye, making similar movements in the widening/narrowing of it’s iris (What? What is that??) to the recurring earthquakes, to what was going on at headquarters at the top of that hill way out in the desert, to the odd, extended Harry Styles dance number at the company shindig where he received a promotion, and that went on waaaay too long.
Unfortunately, what you get for your 18 bucks is little more than a handful of decent performances in a striking but quite soulless set piece. There was probably a bigger, more exciting story to tell, but flipping through glossy advertisements in magazines might not be the best place to start a story. Granted, there are certain regimes the world over rely on highly manipulative, false presentations of happy peasants and bountiful produce, and present it as the natural outcome of its governance, while the true face of it is suppression, terror, and killing.
But if the 1950s wasn’t actually the most innocent, idyllic time in American history—would we have so many movies and TV shows dedicated to the nostalgic atmosphere of it all?
