Don't Worry Darling

dir: Olivia Wilde

2022

Like being told to “relax”, like being told “trust me”, it never works to have dinguses tell you to feel the opposite of what you’re actually feeling.

So, Darling, definitely be Worried.

This modern retread of something we’ve seen a few times already is given a slightly more current update. It is impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, or, let me put it a different way – this film is not unique or complex enough to justify tip-toing around its “big” reveals. So think of this as a review of a lesser movie by M. Night Shyamalan (which means “any movie he’s made since Sixth Sense, which means it has a massive upswelling of twists in order to justify its existence., but the twists themselves aren’t that interesting.

Of course the most interesting and enjoyable part of any film Florence Pugh is in will always be the fact that Florence Pugh is in it. And Florence Pugh is in 90 per cent of the scenes in this movie. It’s her movie. Whatever is happening to her, if we care, is happening to us too.

On that score I cannot discount the flick, because she’s great in everything.

If there’s a problem, it’s that no-one else around her is as convincing, and also this complex, grinding 1950s conformity, wishfulfilling fantasy constructed around her is never really believable. You never feel that anyone could believe it, least of all a smart cookie like Alice (Pugh).

Perfect lawns, perfect modernist houses, perfect sleek and shiny cars, perfect cocktails and perfect sex with their husbands. Perfect heteronormativity as far as the eye can see, but, not perfect uniformity of ethnic or racial non-diversity. We are sold on the image of the post-WWII boom, but there are too many signifiers, too much obviousness that this is not the 1950s.

And if it’s not the 1950s, it must be something pretty bad, mustn’t it?

I was hoping for aliens, but…

Alice has a husband called Jack, played by Harry Styles. In case you don’t know who Harry Styles is, well, I envy you. He’s not a very good actor, or even an okay one, but that is fine here.

It’s especially fine because, when he’s not looking great in a suit and tie, or giving his wife head, and when he’s shown for what he really is, it all makes perfect sense.

His character, with his sometimes British accent, and sometimes terribly unbelievable American accent, is a piece of shit who has trapped a woman who’s way better than him in a horrible and elaborate prison, so he can control her. When she’s out working 30-hour shifts as a surgeon, he’s at home getting radicalised online by men’s rights activist videos and podcasts, wondering why no-one takes him seriously.

So he thought he found the perfect solution. A place, a lifestyle forced at gunpoint upon Alice that she would somehow eventually accept through mindless repetition of catchphrases and a lowering of expectations / consumerist overload.

Sounds like…the old idea of marriage, doesn’t it?

This clearly constructed town of Victory has some kind of purpose beyond just incarcerating people’s minds and souls, but we never really find out what that is. Alice’s husband alludes to it, and says that the work is something terrible, but he does it in order to keep them happy in this bright, shiny place. It sounds chilling, but then this place is the very definition of grim, and Alice isn’t the only one to notice.

Another Stepford wife called Margaret (KiKi Layne) has also figured something out about the nature of this town, so, naturally, the men but especially the women turn on her, call her crazy, tell her she’s dreaming.

And then she’s dead. Is Alice destined for a similar fate? Just because she saw something similar, something anomalous, a red plane, which leads her to a place they’re not meant to go?

Is she fuck.

This company town is ruled by a leader, Frank (Chris Pine) a suave and assured man that everyone else wants to be like or fuck or both. The men of the town especially turn into desperate puppies whenever he’s around. The women, except for Alice, mostly seem to be indifferent to him beyond being obedient, which is weird. You would think these weird trollops would want to have at least three thousand of his babies.

But they don’t. It’s the men who revere him, because he has made them feel like they’re actually important, and not like the basement dwellers they must be.

Frank knows all and sees all, and also stops bullshitting Alice way sooner than everyone else does. He casts aside the perpetual gaslighting for a few moments, tells her that he knows she’s figured something out, but that he intends to use Alice’s attempts to breach the reality of the place in order to improve his bird cage, to make the prison walls tighter for her and the other inmates.

It’s important to be really seen, I guess. Alice thinks, at this late stage, that he’s seeing her as an equal, but, no, he’s just using her for his own ends. At a dinner party she’s meant to be hosting, she casually starts pointing out how strange it is that everyone at the party has one of three points of origin, that all the couples have the same meet cute story, that all of them can only recall having been to only one beach in their entire lives, being the very same beach.

Frank’s been doing this too long, though, and knows how to turn people against the ones who are not sticking with the program.

One of the other “twists” is that there are people in this hell, like Alice, who know what’s going on, but they’re still there voluntarily. They aren’t trying to shut Alice up because they think she’s spouting nonsense – there are other women inside this perfect presentation of the victory of misogyny over all womenkind who want it to continue for their own reasons.

So. What have we learned by the end? All the men know it’s a sham, but they live and sacrifice for the sham in order to control their women and feel like they matter. Most of the women are oblivious, and the ones that speak out get fucked up. All the maniacal cleaning and cooking they do is just to keep them occupied, keep them busy. There is no solidarity among the women unless they’re talking about how great dick is, how much they love cocktails or how none of them really want children.

People who die here genuinely die, which is used to the most comic effect imaginable towards the end when one of the women kills her husband, completely out of the fucking blue, and says “It’s my turn to run things.”

You go, girl, or weird woman (Gemma Chan) who was only pretending to be part of the program, for some reason, who now thinks it will somehow continue.

Look, this flick was absolutely savaged by the critics, and roundly mocked in the media because of stuff that happened pre and post production which made everyone involved (except Florence Pugh and Chris Pine, who come out of this the best) look like maniacs. Director and also one of the main performers here as one of the most vicious of the Stepford wives Olivia Wilde blew up her marriage to Ted Lasso during the making of the flick, by starting some kind of relationship with Harry Styles. That doesn’t sound…like the best environment for getting decent performances from the other actors who maybe resent the fact that the worst actor on set is also banging the director.

It’s unprofessional, at the very least. But is a time, and a film about, how there should equal opportunity for shitty behaviour in Hollywood by all genders, not just shitty men. Everyone should feel free to fuck around, as long as it’s consensual. But how can people consent to an invisible prison, against their will, that they never would have agreed to, had they known about its reality or lack thereof?

Consent is a tricky concept. To some people.

It’s pretty straight-forward to others.

I’ve seen criticism of this flick that says it’s too obvious, or it’s too obtuse, that it’s too straight-forward, or that it doesn’t explain enough how any of this was possible. That it thinks it’s smarter than it is, or that it’s too simplistic.

I think people disliked it for a bunch of valid reasons, and that’s fine. But I think a lot of people disliked it because it made them feel uncomfortable about our own shitty, late-stage capitalist society, and how it traps women, telling them they can’t have it all and then punishing them for whatever choices they make. They’re damned if they’re mothers, and damned if they’re not. They’re damned if they look after house and hearth and don’t find it 100 per cent fulfilling, and they’re damned if they seek meaning from outside of that.

I think there’s value in artistically representing systems constructed in which everyone else loses and only the people maintaining that system win, but I don’t always feel like it requires a 2 hour plus movie to prove your point. This could have worked with a half hour less of whatever it is that Harry Styles thought he was doing, or endlessly drawing out whether Alice was going to be able to escape this Looking Glass – less than Wonder(ful)land. Sorry, that was a very clumsy Lewis Carrol reference, of which there are three thousand in the flick.

I actually think it was okay, and I would have scored it higher if it had been neater (shorter). It’s sounds great, and it looks stupendous thanks to the incredible cinematography of Matthew Libatique, who has been kicking cinematic goals from as far back as when he lensed Requiem for a Dream. A nightmare has never looked so pleasant to the eye.

Don’t Worry Darling. This will only hurt a bit.

7 times marriage is not, I hope, the invisible prison represented here for some people out of 10

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“I've been waiting for someone like you. Someone to challenge me. Like a good girl.” - Don’t Worry Darling