Don’t Worry Darling – Film Review

In the 1950s, Alice and Jack live in the idealized community of Victory, an experimental company town that houses the men who work on a top-secret project. While the husbands toil away, the wives get to enjoy the beauty, luxury and debauchery of their seemingly perfect paradise. However, when cracks in her idyllic life begin to appear, exposing flashes of something sinister lurking below the surface, Alice can’t help but question exactly what she’s doing in Victory.

If there was anyone that was rooting for the success of Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry Darling, it would have to be me. Although my views on the director herself are less than favorable due to recent news stories centered around her on-set behavior, her film still looked to be a legitimately enthralling psychological thriller that would make my skin crawl.

Whoever edited together the trailers for this film deserves all the awards for convincing us all that this was going to be an amazing movie, because Don’t Worry Darling is anything but that. As a matter of fact, it’s most likely the most disappointing movie of the year so far. This is a two-hour bore that never once takes off and instead forces you to sit and watch it in all its mediocrity.

From beginning to end, this entire film plays out like an extreme rip-off of both Get Out and The Truman Show. Of course, both of those films are heaps and bounds better than Don’t Worry Darling, but it was incredibly apparent that Wilde loves those films and wanted to make something similar. Unfortunately, she failed. Miserably.

Katie Silberman‘s script is the kind of bad to the point where you can’t help but wonder how numerous folks at the studio approved this, thinking it would be good. It’s easy to get the feeling that Silberman thought this script was absolutely game-changingly good, but what it actually is, is super pretentious and flat.

The first act of the film isn’t even all that bad, to be honest. It starts off normal enough, and most importantly, it seems as if it’s setting up a story that actually goes somewhere. It looks as if it’s presenting us with characters that we will get to learn more about throughout the course of the film. Sadly, that’s not the case.

Don’t Worry Darling seems to have next to no interest in terms of developing characters as well as fleshing out its outrageously convoluted story. Just when you think you may have a grasp of what this film is going for, things get twice as confusing and frustrating to the point where you’ll just want to check out of the theatre.

Ninety-five percent of this film is essentially Jack and Alice arguing with each other, being horny, going to parties, and Alice feeling uncomfortable. There’s honestly not much else this film has to offer, which is crazy considering the fact that it’s over two hours long. There should be something else to offer, but there genuinely isn’t.

It’s one of the most staggeringly forgettable blockbusters in years. The marketing behind this film was nothing short of gargantuan, and yet what we ended up getting is a colossal dud. It’s made all the more depressing when you remember just how much of a masterpiece Wilde’s previous directorial effort, Booksmart, was.

Florence Pugh does an outstandingly perfect job here in the role of Alice, however. She honestly seemed like the only cast member who put their best foot forward to deliver a remarkable performance. Everyone else just seemed to phone it in, but not Pugh. No matter what she’s acting in, you can rest assured that she’s going to knock your socks off.

Harry Styles isn’t too bad in the role of Jack, although there are a couple of scenes in which he overacts to the point of absurdity, including one argument scene in the third act in which he seemed as if he had no interest in being on set that day. Why this was the take that they went with is anybody’s guess.

The cinematography by Matthew Libatique is also gorgeous. This is a visually dazzling movie and it’s extremely well put together in terms of the actual craft. But when it comes to the storytelling department and the way it was all executed, this is an absolute nightmare. If you are going to see this in the theatre, you should definitely worry, darling.

With an extremely convoluted and deeply uninspired story, Don’t Worry Darling is the biggest disappointment of the year, even if Florence Pugh delivers a phenomenal lead performance.