Mark Reviews Movies: DON'T WORRY DARLING

Don't Worry Darling, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2022

Everything seems perfect in Victory, the clearly imperfect community at the center of Don't Worry Darling. Obviously, it's only "perfect" from a certain perspective, belonging to those who have some idealistic and inherently false impression of what life and society were like circa the 1950s. To say much more about that would probably give away just a bit too much of the game being played by Katie Silberman's screenplay. That's the big problem here: The story is more about the game it's playing than exploring and dissecting the underlying ideas the movie has in mind.

The game, unfortunately, isn't much of one, either. Here, we meet Alice (Florence Pugh), a happy housewife married to Jack (Harry Styles). The two have come to Victory, a planned community in the middle of a vast swath of desert, so that Jack can work on some top-secret project involving "progressive materials"—whatever that might mean. There's no answer to that question, since the secrecy surrounding the project—whether there's something genuinely revolutionary or quite nefarious happening to occasionally cause massive tremors that shake the entire area—simply exists, like so much in this story, as a secret to keep us guessing.

That at least gives the first act or so of this tale, directed by Olivia Wilde for her somewhat ambitious but underwhelming sophomore feature, an undercurrent of uncertainty and mild dread. The story, though, is so busy establishing its various secrets and potential revelations that neither Silberman nor Wilde give us a sense of this place or these characters. As the movie gradually divulges that something is terribly wrong with the whole equation of small-town perfection, then, there's little investment in how the plot and its assorted mysteries subvert that central idea.

Right way, we're introduced to the apparent comfort and contentment of the place. Alice and Jack are holding a party for friends with plenty of dancing and cocktails. The routine of Alice's life is next. She cooks breakfast for Jack, heads into town for ballet lessons and credit-based shopping sprees, has dinner and a whiskey ready for her hubby as soon as he walks through the door, and gets distracted from eating said meal, because the two still act as if they're in the honeymoon phase of their marriage.

The rest of the plot has Alice discovering that all might not be as it seems in Victory. For us, that means a lot of suggestions of eerie and potentially unsettling and generally odd things for us to notice but, apparently, about which not to think too deeply.

Take the case of Frank (Chris Pine), the charismatic founder and leader of Victory, who speaks in vaguely inspiring ways about changing the world with that top-secret project in the desert or in mildly but obviously patronizing ways about women being supportive rocks for their men—as long as that support structure is at home and ready to tend to that man's every want and need. In case one might be too convinced by Pine's charms, there's also a scene of him peeping on Alice and Jack in the throes of passion.

The biggest hint of something being decidedly wrong with Victory is Alice's friend Margaret (KiKi Layne), who claims that her son was abducted during an unauthorized trip into the desert. The powers-that-be have decided that Margaret is lying and requires a prescription cocktail to help her "hysteria," but when Alice witnesses a plane crash and heads out into the desert on her own, she starts having visions that make her think something is dreadfully amiss.

Some of these visions and episodes are subtly unnerving, such as when Alice's regimen of cleaning literally imprisons her, when the routine of wrapping leftovers in plastic almost reflexively gives her the idea to wrap her head in the stuff, and when Margaret reaches her breaking point on the roof of her home. The town doctor (played by Timothy Simons) suggests Alice is suffering from a similar state of "hysteria," and while Jack seems to dismiss the notion, he's also lured closer to Frank and his broad thoughts about the world belonging to them—although it's apparent he's only including one gender in that statement.

All of this—from the strange visions, to the intrinsic philosophy of Victory and its heads, to the various suggestions of what might be going on in Victory and the desert—is broadly communicated, as well. The air of a mystery, with its assorted and enigmatic components, is more important to the filmmakers than any kind of specificity to it. By the end, we come to realize just how much of all of those little details amount to nothing more than a deflection from the truth of this situation.

Silberman isn't trying to keep us on our toes so much as she's distracting us from what turns out to be the most obvious solution to a world that seems based on the strange and absurd logic of a dream. Okay, it's probably the second-most obvious answer, but the point remains: Don't Worry Darling is first and foremost a game that uses some intriguing ideas as little more than tricks.

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