Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) are a young couple living in the community of Victory. Victory is an isolated community outside of a top secret project where Jack and the other men work.
A series of bizarre events lead Alice to begin to question the community’s purpose, and the motives of its mysterious founder, Frank (Chris Pine)...
It took me so long to figure out how to write this review.
It was even hard to pin down the plot teaser above.
Don’t Worry Darling wants to be a paranoid thriller, with shades of The Stepford Wives.
With its fifties styling and approach to women’s roles, the stage seems to be set for some kind of satire on
After all the whispers and magic spit theories, Don’t Worry Darling is a bit of a let down.
Neither a triumph or a disaster, Olivia Wilde’s film is a rather bland thriller.
Florence Pugh carries the whole enterprise on her shoulders, but she can only do so much. Harry Styles is dull, Chris Pine has some good moments but
The movie is never that tense or shocking or mysterious. There are a couple of striking images - the Busby Berkley-style line of chorus dancers which appear throughout as signifiers of Alice’s regimented life in Victory.
What is frustrating about the film is that it never builds to anything.
The reveal of what Victory actually is does not have the ripple effects the filmmakers intend.
Alice realises her life is a lie, but there is no real sense of a building threat or discombobulation.
Part of it is that Alice and Jack’s relationship is not fleshed out. If Pugh and Styles had good chemistry (and Styles could act), it might have made his betrayal more impactful.
The movie ends in a way that - perhaps - intends ambiguity, but it just feels abrupt and anticlimactic.
Ultimately, it is hard to ignore the feeling that there is just isn’t that much going on, either on or under the surface.
Like the location it is set in, Don’t Worry Darling feels like a facsimile of a smarter, scarier movie.
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