Movie Review : Don't Worry Darling (2022)
Some ideas look great on paper. A Florence Pugh and Harry Styles-lead dystopian thriller directed by a woman sounds exactly like 2022 needed. In a cultural landscape dominated by Disney and Warner Brothers, a progressive-thinking original screenplay being not only produced, but massively backed by a major studio is a rare occurrence. Don’t Worry Darling should've been a shining beacon of what cinema is a capable of, but it’s not and it isn’t because Olivia Wilde was mean to Florence Pugh during production.
Don't get me wrong, it's not the piece of shit critics claim it is. It's just milquetoast and awkward.
Don’t Worry Darling tells the story of Alice Chambers (Pugh) and her husband Jack (Styles), a young married couple living in a private community in the middle of the desert in the sixties. They live a rather symbiotic, problem-free existence until their neighbour Margaret (KiKi Layne) starts acting erratically and asking weird existential questions. Then a red plane falls from the sky, which leads Alice to betray the cardinal rule of her community: stay in town, where it's safe. Except her town isn’t safe at all.
Million Dollar Ambitions, Ten Cents Execution
I'm sure you've already noticed from my synopsis: Don't Worry Darling is a movie with ambitious themes and visions, but that does the small stuff rather poorly. By small stuff, I mean telling a coherent and engaging story. It has all the signifiers : a weird utopian community, an enigmatic leader, characters who mysteriously seem programmed to act a certain way, strange rituals no one seems to notice, etc. But good storytelling ties these signifiers together in a satisfying and captivating way.
It is not the case here.
My main complain is that Alice doesn't have tangible motivations to do anything she does. The plane crash I mentioned above? It is completely dropped from the storyline after the scene. It would've been easy to bring up later and have another character claim she was hallucinating or that no actual plane crashed into the mountain, but Don't Worry Darling doesn't do that. The red plane is just a plain ol’, unsubtle RED HERRING that serves as an inciting incident to Alice. It isn’t connected to her or the overall story.
Although it is framed to be a female empowerment narrative, the original screenplay for Don’t Worry Darling was written by two men: brothers Carey and Shane Van Dyke. It was ultimately rewritten by Katie Silberman, but there’s only so much you can do in a rewrite. Especially on a mechanical level. Don’t Worry Darling is ultimately a story where things happen to people, but you're never actually sure what these things mean or why they ultimately matter. That screenplay did not serve the movie’s ambitions at all.
The other thing is: these ambitions were great. Don’t Worry Darling wants to be an indictment of American Exceptionalism and how its rhetoric trickles down into more extreme forms to an audience that feel entitled to it (READ HERE INCELS), but it lacks the weapons to craft a compelling narrative to sell its ideas. It’s aesthetically gorgeous, clever by moments and sometimes (un)intentionally funny, but Don’t Worry Darling goes as far as its screenplay leads it and it doesn’t go that far.
Ayn Rand, Bioshock and the world of endless, undevelopped possibilities
Here’s where I’m going to go a little nuts. If Don’t Worry Darling had been the next Bioshock video game instead of a movie, it would've been kind of awesome. I would’ve easily taken ten to twelve hours of Alice running around, gathering clues about the Victory Project and SMASHING THE SHIT out of weird men in red jump suits instead of two hours of her trying to blindly figure out her faith. Because like Bioshock, Don’t Worry Darling is really (or wants to be) an answer to Rand-ian ideals.
Some of the movie's ideas were loaded with potential. Outside of being interpreted by a Chris Pine who looks more and more like Gary from Team America World Police with every year, Frank was a solid vilain who ended up just never doing anything. Ideologically surfing the line between John Galt and Jordan Peterson, Frank seemed controlling, abusive and oddly kinky. Outside of hilariously peering on an intense session of fingerbanging between Alice and Jack, he never really delivered on his menace.
I will not burn the plot twist even if I thought it was kind of dumb, but the Victory Project isn’t some kind of utopian community for Ayn Rand lovers. It's both more complex and more idiotic than that. The big reveal was a rather bold throwback to nineties television ,when we didn't know what the future would look like an imagined it to be filled with steel and wires and like everything in Don’t Worry Darling, it looked like it would be fun until absolutely fucking nothing came of it.
*
I was really rooting for Don’t Worry Darling to be good. After being smacked around by media for weeks over non-artistic reasons, I would've loved for the movie to stick it to these unfair critics. Although it clearly LOOKS the part, Don’t Worry Darling simply didn't deliver like a chiseled boxer getting winded and knocked out in the third round. It's not a master piece (it’s not even good), but it’s not even bad or poorly crafter either. It's just floating between the two ends of the spectrum that would’ve made it interesting.
