Don’t Worry Darling (2022) - Gorgeous to watch, difficult to unravel
Credit: allocine.fr
Every now and then comes a film that attracts attention for the wrong reasons. It started promisingly, a bedazzling trailer with a star-studded cast. Such anticipation was quickly followed by unsettling rumours of behind-the-scenes tension and jealousy, culminating with divisive promotional material, reports left, right and centre commenting on the fact that the main cast ‘weren’t standing next to each other’.
Olivia Wilde’s latest thriller Don’t Worry Darling undoubtedly does have plot holes. Some of its key twists are then immediately disregarded and forgotten about. Some of its performances may even be a little weak. Its message is fuzzy, unclear – and strikingly overused if it is the most obvious one. In the end, it is one of these films that you choose to side with, or not. Are you invested in it enough that you decide to sit back and enjoy it despite glaring inconsistencies, or do you simply cast it aside as a quickly-completed failure, flawed in script and destabilised by cast hostility?
I am of the former team. Completely alone in the cinema, I found myself frequently checking behind me at every horror-tinged scene. But wasn’t it also to make sure no one was invading the bubble Wilde had created, in which I was temporarily – gleefully – trapped?
Florence Pugh is magnetic as Alice, a 1950s-style housewife who day in, day out, watches suave husband Jack (a perfectly adequate Harry Styles) disappear in his convertible, before tending to her quotidian cleaning, cooking and wandering. The two of them spend the rest of the time with their friends and neighbours (Nick Kroll and Wilde herself amongst others) or having sex on Alice’s meticulously prepared dinners (quite saddening). All are part of the Victory Project, an uber secret organisation fronted by the sinister Frank (Chris Pine), which requires the men to drive into work each day and the women to stay at home. This should be simple, but when one of the Victory wives, Margaret (Kiki Layne), starts exhibiting strange behaviour, Alice quickly follows suit.
Credit: allocine.fr
Just from glancing at the trailer, it is clear: Don’t Worry Darling is aesthetically gorgeous, drawing both in subject and style on its most obvious influence, The Stepford Wives. Whether this is the Californian valley setting dotted with uniform bungalows and palm trees, the 1950s style dress and hair, or the squared-off, vinyl-infused interiors, it is a visual exploit, as complemented by its cinematography as it is by the lulling of its original song, With You All The Time, which Pugh constantly hums to herself throughout with a lost air of dreaminess.
The fantasy sequences she gradually succumbs to are less effective, and a little off-putting, if only because they distract from the sheer joy of the blissful 1950s mise-en-scène. There is something quite mechanic about the film at times, whether this is in the dialogue, or in the hyper strange puppet dance Style engages in halfway through. One wonders whether this is a fault in the script, or the very point of the film, to underline the manipulation weaving its way through Victory. It's easy to sit back and inhabit the town with Alice in the end, almost as though the film mirrors the men who tell their wives every morning to sit back, relax and wait for them to come home. Is Don’t Worry Darling literally telling its audiences “don’t worry darling”? Or is there some other message, lost halfway amongst rejected plot points? Much like the Victory wives themselves, we are left unsure at its conclusion whether to go along with it, captivated by its beauty but inevitably confused by its intentions.