Don't Worry Darling hits theaters on Sept. 23, 2022.
Don’t Worry Darling wants to be Get Out for white women, a strange concept even if it didn’t end up closer to “white feminist Antebellum.” From director Olivia Wilde and screenwriter Katie Silberman, it’s the tale of a young couple, Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles), who live in a pristine 1950s company town, of which Alice slowly grows suspicious. The strange goings-on around her are complemented by eye-catching designs and inventive music, and are brought to life through commendable performances. However, the way these elements are assembled leaves plenty to be desired, amidst the film’s pursuit of dimensionless literalism about women in American society. It sets a low bar to begin with before failing to clear it.
When the story opens, its characters seem content. Alice and Jack — childless by choice — drink, make merry, and play party games with their guests, Bunny (Wilde) and Bill (Nick Kroll), who have two kids, and Peg (Kate Berlant) and Peter (Asif Ali), who are expecting their first. Neither the alliterative couple names nor the respective parent dynamics plays any meaningful part, but the fluidity of this opening scene is a precursor to the rigidity of the next morning, and every morning after that, when the women stand out on their driveways, smiling as they watch their men all leave for work at the same time in their shiny cars. They live in the newly built town of Victory, part of the mysterious “Victory Project” run by the enigmatic, secretive Frank (Chris Pine), whose pictures adorn the women’s ballet studio run by his wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan), and whose mountain headquarters resides just outside the town. The women have been told their husbands are developing “progressive materials” and nothing more; they mustn’t ask questions or venture outside the town limits, but are free to clean, cook, or merely frolic poolside with their friends, if they so desire.
Everything is as it should be, at least according to Frank’s daily radio broadcasts (ignore the cult-like flags adorning every street!), and Alice sees no reason to complain. That is, until her neighbor Margaret (KiKi Layne) begins acting strangely, referencing things she could not have seen as she clutches a red toy airplane to her chest. She’s probably ill, the men say, and the women largely agree — until one fine day, Alice watches a similar red plane, full size, fall from the sky, just over the mountain. And yet, both Jack and Frank convince her that this is impossible, leading her to pull on the loose threads she finds around her whenever she notices things that don’t quite add up.
The problem with this approach, however, is that rather than capturing its tale of paranoia through a paranoid lens, Don’t Worry Darling is quick to confirm Alice’s perspective, even if it doesn’t explain the dreamlike events unfolding around her (for instance, a wall that seems to close in on her as she cleans it). In the process, it burdens Pugh with the onus of asking probing questions about Victory and the other women of the town, but it rarely embodies those questions, or her feelings of coming undone. It seems instead to hover overhead, keeping the factual answers just out of reach while signaling to the viewer: don’t worry, darling, the answers are coming now that the questions have been asked just once or twice. What is clear from the trailers and basic premise becomes clear to Alice as well: something is gravely amiss, given how content the other women seem to be with their domesticity, and she seems to half-remember snippets of events that don’t quite gel with these surroundings.
To compare Don’t Worry Darling to The Stepford Wives would be to suggest that it has a satirical streak; it is, ironically, more of a Stepford wife itself. It’s far too mechanical in its metaphors, which become all but metaphorical by the end, even though its eventual rug-pulls offer zero by way of meaning when it comes to the symbolism pervading Alice’s visions. It amounts to nothing at all, and the secrets it reveals amount to even less, though they’ll certainly remind you of about eight different film and TV stories that executed similar concepts with more panache, several of them recently. Some of these similarities can be forgiven — the script was written before WandaVision aired, but there’s sizable overlap (don’t worry, darling, this isn’t a spoiler) — but some of the imagery, of people in jet-black imaginary realms, and accompanying dialogue about “sinking” feel all but directly evocative of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Intentional or otherwise, it’s a bit unsavory, especially considering how Don’t Worry Darling does (or rather, doesn’t) handle race.
For one thing, its 1950s setting is distinctly color-blind, with a few East Asian, South Asian, Black, and Jewish characters fitting in neatly into this white picket fence setting, albeit into its background, with zero mention or acknowledgement (Layne’s character was originally meant to be played by Dakota Johnson, so her being Black has nothing to do with the story). It’s a giveaway in some ways, though it arguably has an in-story excuse as well. Regardless, it’s still reason to question the choice of a 1950s premise, wherein the film’s vision of female domesticity is a white construction — Black women at the time had no such luxury and were forced to work — but it is not, in this case, a commentary on whiteness (Wilde’s Booksmart, while more enjoyable, was similarly blinkered). In-world explanations can be mustered, but the film doesn’t try, and its narrative lens separates ideas of race and gender in ways they can’t really be decoupled.
It feels short-sighted at best, and at worst, it leaves a gaping hole at the center of its criticism of power from a present vantage. It hopes to critique societal structures, but even its visual fabric, with its white characters in focus and non-white characters turned into window dressing behind them, often says the opposite. If white womanhood is the center of its tale of identity being stripped away — being dulled, flattened, and homogenized — does the same not apply to other vectors of identity? It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but there are enough holes elsewhere in its construction that it becomes a low-hanging “this you?”, proving the film isn’t nearly as smart as it purports to be. It wants to side with Alice, but in minor ways, it ends up becoming Frank, with his regressive sense of “order.”
Wilde has spoken about how she considers Pine’s character a Jordan Peterson type, and while there’s roundabout truth to this — in that it can be intellectualized after the fact, once certain details come to light — Frank is only ever presented as an entity distinct from any such real-world comparison, save perhaps for charismatic cult leaders who, unlike Peterson’s explicit preaching about gender essentialism, don’t generally speak in such direct terms. Granted, counter-examples can likely be found, but it’s a matter of cadence too; if Wilde wanted a toxic YouTube figurehead “destroying” opponents with “reason and logic,” she has missed the mark and ended up with a smiling televangelist, whose arguments feel moralistic. There’s a thin line between them, but a line all the same.
Pine no doubt performs admirably, but he suffers as the rest of the cast does: he isn’t afforded the opportunity to create dimensions. Pugh is bogged down by paranoia to the degree that she’s left with no real personality — no wants or desires that drive her to break free — and Styles, while certainly measured and capable (people have complained about his accent work; it makes perfect sense in context), barely exists outside of Jack’s relationship to Alice. He’s good to her, or so it seems, but when more layers begin to emerge, they don’t stem from the kind of ugly, human place that would benefit this kind of cinematic critique; instead, they’re a flipped switch.
On the plus side, Don’t Worry Darling is pretty to look at, and in the moments when it feels like Pugh is on the run, the camera and editing may seldom aid in enhancing her perspective, but the music goes a long way. The dead space around her is at least filled with John Powell’s innovative compositions, which use human breath to accentuate mood; it sounds like the characters are drowning, even if the movie never manages to frame them this way and create the adequate thrills.
Eventually, what Wilde hopes to say about domesticity, in the past or in the present, ends up buried beneath both logistical contrivances — its answers only offer more questions, and hardly intriguing ones — and emotional contrivances too, wherein the endpoint of Alice’s journey ends up being applied to several other characters as well, without them having taken remotely similar steps. In pursuit of being rousing at any cost, it skips enough beats and narrative stages to feel preachy without the substance (or even the style) to back it up.
Its vague thesis is hardly disagreeable — it circles the idea that women should have the option of working outside the home — but it’s never aesthetically persuasive when it comes to it broader examinations of power or liberation (let alone anti-feminist radicalization), ideas which exist in its margins, but which it doesn’t have the ability to train its camera toward.
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