Don’t Worry Darling

Grade: C+

You might spend at least as much time online trying to figure out Don’t Worry Darling as you did watching it. The trailer looked terrific, and much of the film itself is more of that feel. It has ambition, and tries so hard, only to fall short when attempting to be too complicated and clever for its own good. It’s like those hollow eggs that our heroine discovers are fake when she cracks one and there’s nothing inside.

She is Alice, played by Florence Pugh, who has rapidly become one of my favorite actresses. I would see her in anything. She and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) live in some kind of perfect suburban paradise called The Victory Project. It made me think of The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show, and in the interest of preserving the mystery, I’ll stop naming potential influences. It appears to be the mid-1950s, judging from the outfits, transportation, technology, and the traditional roles of husbands and wives. All of the men in the community work in the same place. The wives never really find out what they do there, and neither do we. Their pompous boss, Frank, is the creator of The Victory Project. Chris Pine seems to be channeling Peter Gallagher’s real estate king from American Beauty in his portrayal here. All the women stay at home and do housewife stuff: clean, do dishes, shop, daydrink, take a dance class, and begin cooking dinner for their husbands’ arrival home from work.

Alice begins to suspect that things aren’t quite right. I won’t spoil specifics of plot points; I’ll leave you to be confused, overwhelmed, and frustrated by them on your own time. The score is intrusive and manipulative – often butting in to telegraph how we should be feeling. There’s a scene at a dance where relatively benign things are happening, but we are supposed to be uneasy because Pugh’s character has tears welling up, and…well, just listen to the music. There’s a confrontation at a dinner party where few lines spoken are comprehensible, but that sure was a lot of words they used. Every new development just raises more questions. I think these characters never give each other an honest straight answer because it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny anyway.

This is Olivia Wilde’s second feature film as a director. Her first, Booksmart, started off with so much charm and promise, but became a bit of a runaway train with too many bells and whistles – much like Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde obviously knows her way around a camera, and can put together a spectacle with bombast. I believe she has the chops, and has a truly great one in her that will come out one day, if she can learn how to reign it in before the test tubes shatter. She once said that if a movie is bad, it’s the director’s fault. Let me just leave that there.

Grade: C+