In her promotion for Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde talked up the music cue that Styles, her current boyfriend, wrote in five minutes for a snippet of music that haunts Alice in the film.
What’s up with the blood spot–single eye–dancing ladies montage? Like Alice running up that desert hill toward freedom or Spitgate conspiracy theorists, we are, in fact, still worrying. (At least the missing comma from the film’s title is innocent.) Along the way, Don’t Worry Darling unfurls a series of moments that make you go, “Wait, what?” In an attempt to parse the film’s half-baked interior logic and sparse character motivations, we’ve compiled a list of lingering questions.
Wilde and screenwriter Katie Silberman’s intentions - “It’s gaslighting, get it?” - are so clear from the beginning that the film never quite escapes the shadow of all that expectation. While the “husbands” are allowed to move in and out of virtual space so they can work and pay Frank, their “wives” are trapped - until the hair-bow-wearing Alice, like the one in Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Wonderland, wakes up. (Wilde has compared Frank to Jordan Peterson.) On the outside, those men have all abducted and restrained the women who appear in the Victory simulation. The reveal is this: Everyone in Victory is living in a simulation designed by Frank, who in our real (present-day) world is an incel-like cult leader who has brainwashed men to pay him to live in a virtual-reality simulation of the 1950s. Their difference in opinion leads to a mid-film twist that attempts to mash together The Stepford Wives with movies like Strange Days, Get Out, and Serenity, plus some commentary on toxic masculinity.
But when Alice realizes something is deeply wrong with this place and with its leader, Frank (Chris Pine), Jack is unsympathetic. While Jack works on “progressive materials” for the secretive Victory Project, Alice cooks, cleans, shops, socializes, and drinks with the other Victory Project wives who live in her cul-de-sac. The film stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles as married couple Alice and Jack, who seemingly live in the 1950s in a planned community plopped in the middle of the desert. The movie’s twist ending aims to deliver a head trip, to limited effect - the film is so obvious in its attempt to evoke one that its self-consciousness ends up being self-defeating. Olivia Wilde’s sophomore feature, the drama-plagued Don’t Worry Darling, opened to a $19 million box-office opening in September and is now streaming on HBO Max.
Spoilers follow for the film Don’t Worry Darling.Īt a certain point, one must put gossip aside and dig into a piece of work on its own merits.
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