Don't Worry Darling: Movie Review

Cast: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Nick Kroll, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan
Director: Olivia Wilde

If ever a film were so guaranteed box office success due to its word-of-mouth and extra-celluloid activities than its on screen content, Don't Worry Darling would be atop the charts for months to come.

From dramas over relationships on set to seeming phlegm-based accusations at premieres, it feels like Booksmart director's Olivia Wilde's 1950s-scratch-beneath-the-veneer-of-Utopia has run its course before it even releases.

Pugh and Styles star as perma-honeymooning couple Alice and Jack, who live in the idyllic community of Victory, a township on the edge of a desert where the skies are always blue, the men are always working hard and the women always stay home to ensure a scotch is ready for them when they come home.

But Alice is troubled by her so-called perfect existence; while the other women in the cul-de-sac have their kids and drinks on the lawn daily, she starts to feel something is awry in paradise. It's a feeling compounded when another of the wives starts behaving strangely at a barbecue for community founder Frank (Pine)....

With its disorienting edges of perfection, its Edward Scissorhands-like departure of the husbands and its moments of Get Out oddness, Don't Worry Darling's chief problem is one of deja-vu. More than anything else, despite Wilde's insertion of Exorcist-like interruption images and screeching soundtrack, Don't Worry Darling feels like a film that doesn't quite have an identity of its own. Black Mirror, The Stepford Wives - the allusions are numerous and disappointingly obvious throughout. A third act revelation is disgracefully garbled and quickly dispatched, with its obvious themes of feminism and male influence far too easily resolved and explained.

That's the issue with Don't Worry Darling - much like Alice in the story, who disappears down the rabbit hole, if you scratch too hard to get below, there's a depressing feeling of hollowness within. 

And yet, were it not for Florence Pugh's compellingly powerful performance and Pine's cult-like charisma, Don't Worry Darling would be a crushingly average episode of a Utopia-gone-wrong style TV show. 

Pugh, in particular, rallies the film and delivers an Alice that's struggling while being continually gaslit and ignored but yet whose journey is worth enduring when the movie script ails her.

Ultimately Don't Worry Darling is a perfectly serviceable thriller, that's let down by its finale and that can't sustain its sense of mystery throughout. Much like Alice discovers when she crumbles some eggs while cooking and nothing comes out, it looks appealing from the outside but is frustratingly empty within.