Pyrrhic Victory
Let's at least give Don't Worry Darling this much credit: it's easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any real degree. It cannot lecture at us because it's not smart enough to have an argument, in other words. So let's not give it too much credit.
The film is a smudgy, blurry copy of a copy: it's trying (very, very blatantly) to be Get Out about sexism instead of racism, when Get Out was already The Stepford Wives about racism instead of sexism. In theory, Don't Worry Darling could have therefore just been a rip-off of The Stepford Wives directly, but instead it becomes this doubly-diluted mess of half-formed ideas, starting with a story by brothers Carey & Shane Van Dyke (I bet those names don't mean much to you - why should they? They didn't mean much to me until I looked them up, and discovered that they were responsible for the final draft of the hellacious 2012 horror film Chernobyl Diaries, which if nothing else helps explain why Don't Worry Darling is such a dumb failure of a story), that was then reshaped and turned into a screenplay by Katie Silberman, and directed by Olivia Wilde. Silberman and Wilde are re-teaming from Booksmart, an extremely different project in every way except they both have a kind of vague "doing politics" vibe that makes sense as something that would be attractive to a socially-committed but not especially insightful actor-turned-director; Booksmart at least had the decency to tell one story from start to finish.
Don't Worry Darling, in contrast, is just... stuff. There's for sure a narrative arc that connects all the stuff, but the closer you get to it, the less it resembles a movie and the more it starts to break apart into a fog of various notions for scenes, or portions fragments of scenes, or even just a few striking images. And to extend one further piece of credit to Don't Worry Darling, it does often look very striking. Wilde is making all of the choices as director, rarely with any obvious rhyme or reason, but she certainly cannot be accused of laziness here: there's scene cross-cutting between two cameras revolving around three characters in complete circles that is pure visual nonsense, but by God it's fearlessly stylised. There are hallucination sequences full of graphic matches and visual callbacks and re-creations of 1930s cinema. Actors look straight into the camera in centered compositions. Lens flares slice across the frame in perfect diagonals. None of it works in tandem and it's sometimes not even the "right" choice considered in isolation (the lens flares never, ever work, for example), but it's a real cornucopia of directorial gestures, and cinematographer Matthew Libatique is doing his best work since, I don't know, maybe Noah back in 2014 in executing all of the stylistic nonsense with strong use of natural lighting to make everything feel a little drained out in the way things are drained by sunlight in the desert.
The story behind all of this... what is the story behind all of this. Again, it makes sense as long as you just think in the broad strokes, and the second you start to try and piece together what happens in each individual moment, the whole thing collapses. And that's even more the case once the film hits its reveal of what all the attendant mysteries have been leading up to for its first 100 minutes. I shall not spoil that reveal, except to say that it causes a movie that has been a mediocre trudge to suddenly become quite atrocious, but not in a fun "what is this gaudy shit?" way. Just in a "this is stupid and nonsensical way", especially since the reveal, far from answering the mysteries, largely makes them more incomprehensible.
But anyway, the broad strokes: in the American Southwest in the 1950s, there is a planned community called Victory, and here Alice (Florence Pugh) lives with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). She spends all her days happily and dutifully tending to their lovely midcentury suburban home, cooking and shopping and drinking cocktails with all the other housewives, and then enjoying mindblowing sex when Jack comes home from his mysterious, secretive, shady job - the same job every other man in Victory has, all under the guidance of the warmly authoritarian Frank (Chris Pine), who runs Victory like a cult of personality if ever I've seen one. Things are going well to an almost unholy degree, when Alice starts finding that things aren't quite making sense: the routine tremors that shake Victory (never explained, contradicted by the reveal) are one thing, but the odd behavior of her former friend Margaret (KiKi Layne), who has since gone crazy since losing her child (thinks it's explained by the reveal, but in fact made less explicable) is another, and Alice is starting to notice traces of Margaret's paranoia in herself. Things start to seem increasingly strange: a carton of eggs without insides (never explained, but I can come up with a fanwank - or antifan-wank, at least), the walls of her house literally closing in on her (not explained, and I think this is actually supposed to just be in her head). And then she sees a plane crash outside of town (incompatible with the reveal), and when she heads out to investigate it, things get extremely unpleasant for her.
So it's a swipe at '50s social mores and gender roles, right? Up until it's not, but I don't think there's ever something that it will be more than that. Wilde is mostly treating Don't Worry Darling as a nondescript thriller, and it's an okay version of that, aided substantially by John Powell's tuneless, menacingly modernist score. It's never, ever a good version of that; at 123 minutes, the film never even pretends that it gives a shit about tight pacing, and it spends a lot of its running time just kind of hanging out with Alice and her gals, notable among them Bunny, played by Wilde herself as the archetypal sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued alpha female almost as invested in maintaining a patriarchal status quo as the men, so long as she gets to be at the top of her own segment of the social hierarchy (this, despite not being presented as a mystery at all, is successfully explained by the reveal, and in fact may be the only thing that is). Sometimes the film seems besotted by the cleanliness and casual elegance of '50s suburbia, sometimes it's mixing appreciation for the era's visual style with commentary on its conformity (the very best shot in the whole movie is from on high, pointing straight down as all the men drive to work in perfect unison, in their multi-colored cars; it's both lovely and slightly terrifying). When it tries to assert itself as a thriller, it does so in great ungainly lunges; the lack of pacing across the whole film manifests in individual scenes as well, so instead of slowly boiling us alive in scenes that erupt in Alice having some manner of paranoid attack, the film keeps suddenly bursting into this or that moment of tension, quite at random, and rarely with any follow-through. This leaves an impossible situation for Pugh, who is doing everything in her power to make Alice a functional character; for her trouble, she gets the wobbly honors of being the best member of a cast that's mostly pretty dreadful (Pine is the only other actor here I enjoyed watching, and he's in something like five or six minutes of the whole film). But it's something.
Don't Worry Darling came into theaters after one of the most disastrous marketing tours in recent memory, which largely consisted of making Wilde seem like an abusive hypocrite, Styles a blithering imbecile, and left it as clear as it could be without Pugh taking an ad out in a trade paper that she despises this movie and wants to never think of it again nor speak of it. It was easy to hope, after all that, for a real ghastly farrago, a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe of ill judgment and messiness. What we got couldn't have been more different (without being, you know, good): a completely dull, shapeless collection of scenes that mostly have interesting visuals and mostly feel like they've been written by malfunctioning robots. Don't Worry Darling is an excruciatingly boring film, the worst conceivable fate for something with its particular form of notoriety; even its dumbfounding final act is largely boring, it's just boring in a more hatefully idiotic register than the trite '50s satire of the preceding film. The film offers nothing at all worth having: it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not even infuriating. It's just there, weirdly proud of its non-insights and its utter failure to be a thrilling mystery. I'd love to think it's terrible, but it is so much more dispiriting than that: it's mediocre.
The film is a smudgy, blurry copy of a copy: it's trying (very, very blatantly) to be Get Out about sexism instead of racism, when Get Out was already The Stepford Wives about racism instead of sexism. In theory, Don't Worry Darling could have therefore just been a rip-off of The Stepford Wives directly, but instead it becomes this doubly-diluted mess of half-formed ideas, starting with a story by brothers Carey & Shane Van Dyke (I bet those names don't mean much to you - why should they? They didn't mean much to me until I looked them up, and discovered that they were responsible for the final draft of the hellacious 2012 horror film Chernobyl Diaries, which if nothing else helps explain why Don't Worry Darling is such a dumb failure of a story), that was then reshaped and turned into a screenplay by Katie Silberman, and directed by Olivia Wilde. Silberman and Wilde are re-teaming from Booksmart, an extremely different project in every way except they both have a kind of vague "doing politics" vibe that makes sense as something that would be attractive to a socially-committed but not especially insightful actor-turned-director; Booksmart at least had the decency to tell one story from start to finish.
Don't Worry Darling, in contrast, is just... stuff. There's for sure a narrative arc that connects all the stuff, but the closer you get to it, the less it resembles a movie and the more it starts to break apart into a fog of various notions for scenes, or portions fragments of scenes, or even just a few striking images. And to extend one further piece of credit to Don't Worry Darling, it does often look very striking. Wilde is making all of the choices as director, rarely with any obvious rhyme or reason, but she certainly cannot be accused of laziness here: there's scene cross-cutting between two cameras revolving around three characters in complete circles that is pure visual nonsense, but by God it's fearlessly stylised. There are hallucination sequences full of graphic matches and visual callbacks and re-creations of 1930s cinema. Actors look straight into the camera in centered compositions. Lens flares slice across the frame in perfect diagonals. None of it works in tandem and it's sometimes not even the "right" choice considered in isolation (the lens flares never, ever work, for example), but it's a real cornucopia of directorial gestures, and cinematographer Matthew Libatique is doing his best work since, I don't know, maybe Noah back in 2014 in executing all of the stylistic nonsense with strong use of natural lighting to make everything feel a little drained out in the way things are drained by sunlight in the desert.
The story behind all of this... what is the story behind all of this. Again, it makes sense as long as you just think in the broad strokes, and the second you start to try and piece together what happens in each individual moment, the whole thing collapses. And that's even more the case once the film hits its reveal of what all the attendant mysteries have been leading up to for its first 100 minutes. I shall not spoil that reveal, except to say that it causes a movie that has been a mediocre trudge to suddenly become quite atrocious, but not in a fun "what is this gaudy shit?" way. Just in a "this is stupid and nonsensical way", especially since the reveal, far from answering the mysteries, largely makes them more incomprehensible.
But anyway, the broad strokes: in the American Southwest in the 1950s, there is a planned community called Victory, and here Alice (Florence Pugh) lives with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). She spends all her days happily and dutifully tending to their lovely midcentury suburban home, cooking and shopping and drinking cocktails with all the other housewives, and then enjoying mindblowing sex when Jack comes home from his mysterious, secretive, shady job - the same job every other man in Victory has, all under the guidance of the warmly authoritarian Frank (Chris Pine), who runs Victory like a cult of personality if ever I've seen one. Things are going well to an almost unholy degree, when Alice starts finding that things aren't quite making sense: the routine tremors that shake Victory (never explained, contradicted by the reveal) are one thing, but the odd behavior of her former friend Margaret (KiKi Layne), who has since gone crazy since losing her child (thinks it's explained by the reveal, but in fact made less explicable) is another, and Alice is starting to notice traces of Margaret's paranoia in herself. Things start to seem increasingly strange: a carton of eggs without insides (never explained, but I can come up with a fanwank - or antifan-wank, at least), the walls of her house literally closing in on her (not explained, and I think this is actually supposed to just be in her head). And then she sees a plane crash outside of town (incompatible with the reveal), and when she heads out to investigate it, things get extremely unpleasant for her.
So it's a swipe at '50s social mores and gender roles, right? Up until it's not, but I don't think there's ever something that it will be more than that. Wilde is mostly treating Don't Worry Darling as a nondescript thriller, and it's an okay version of that, aided substantially by John Powell's tuneless, menacingly modernist score. It's never, ever a good version of that; at 123 minutes, the film never even pretends that it gives a shit about tight pacing, and it spends a lot of its running time just kind of hanging out with Alice and her gals, notable among them Bunny, played by Wilde herself as the archetypal sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued alpha female almost as invested in maintaining a patriarchal status quo as the men, so long as she gets to be at the top of her own segment of the social hierarchy (this, despite not being presented as a mystery at all, is successfully explained by the reveal, and in fact may be the only thing that is). Sometimes the film seems besotted by the cleanliness and casual elegance of '50s suburbia, sometimes it's mixing appreciation for the era's visual style with commentary on its conformity (the very best shot in the whole movie is from on high, pointing straight down as all the men drive to work in perfect unison, in their multi-colored cars; it's both lovely and slightly terrifying). When it tries to assert itself as a thriller, it does so in great ungainly lunges; the lack of pacing across the whole film manifests in individual scenes as well, so instead of slowly boiling us alive in scenes that erupt in Alice having some manner of paranoid attack, the film keeps suddenly bursting into this or that moment of tension, quite at random, and rarely with any follow-through. This leaves an impossible situation for Pugh, who is doing everything in her power to make Alice a functional character; for her trouble, she gets the wobbly honors of being the best member of a cast that's mostly pretty dreadful (Pine is the only other actor here I enjoyed watching, and he's in something like five or six minutes of the whole film). But it's something.
Don't Worry Darling came into theaters after one of the most disastrous marketing tours in recent memory, which largely consisted of making Wilde seem like an abusive hypocrite, Styles a blithering imbecile, and left it as clear as it could be without Pugh taking an ad out in a trade paper that she despises this movie and wants to never think of it again nor speak of it. It was easy to hope, after all that, for a real ghastly farrago, a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe of ill judgment and messiness. What we got couldn't have been more different (without being, you know, good): a completely dull, shapeless collection of scenes that mostly have interesting visuals and mostly feel like they've been written by malfunctioning robots. Don't Worry Darling is an excruciatingly boring film, the worst conceivable fate for something with its particular form of notoriety; even its dumbfounding final act is largely boring, it's just boring in a more hatefully idiotic register than the trite '50s satire of the preceding film. The film offers nothing at all worth having: it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not even infuriating. It's just there, weirdly proud of its non-insights and its utter failure to be a thrilling mystery. I'd love to think it's terrible, but it is so much more dispiriting than that: it's mediocre.
