By Glenn Dunks
To quote Lady Gaga: That’s gossip!
To ignore the gossip cycle that has become the press tour of Don’t Worry Darling can be difficult in the macro, but when the movie started it slipped away quite easily. For whatever may have been said about Olivia Wilde’s second directorial feature in the lead up to its release, that friction hasn’t quite come through on screen.
It’s not a good movie in the sense that it is coherent and fully grapples with the ideas it appears to be putting forward. It isn't and it doesn't. But it also is not a bad movie in that it is badly made or devoid of imagination or one where you can tell everybody on set hated everyone else. Which, after everything that’s happened, feels like more of a win in the moment than it oughta be...
Wilde directs her grammatically incorrect sci-fi drama-thriller with confidence. The production step up from Booksmart is easily evident and the film is triumphant in areas like art direction (Katie Byron), costume design (Madonna regular and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Oscar-nominee Arianne Phillips) and sound. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Black Swan, A Star is Born) throws enough into the visual landscape to ensure it’s never an ugly movie to have flick across the eyeballs although it has a habit of repeating its visual flourishes to a degree that can become slightly exhausting.
Where Don’t Worry Darling unfortunately fumbles is the screenplay by Katie Silberman (who also scripted Booksmart). Based on a story credit by two men responsible for Chernobyl Diaries and, yes, Titanic II, the story is an amalgamation of a whole host of influences. The Stepford Wives, The Truman Show, Black Swan, Black Mirror and even the long-forgotten Matrix-era The Thirteenth Floor rise most prominently to the foreground, with Wilde herself unable to iron out the many inconsistencies, the plot holes and the general air of uncertainty that arise as a result of its plot-puzzle assembly.
The screenplay throws ideas at the viewer wholesale, expecting us to not question them. But questioning them is all we typically have once the end credits role. Why were the eggshells actually empty, for example? Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t actually have an answer for you, it just hopes you don’t remember long enough to ask by distracting you with shiny baubles. Silberman and Wilde have cool ideas to demonstrate the fragile mental state of Florence Pugh’s Alice (even that name, I mean…!), but the film quickly loses logic and so all they are are ideas without the filmmaking bravery to commit to bigger, broader storytelling choices. The biggest question of all, perhaps, is why there is no comma in the title—something else that could be deliberate if I felt they had thought that much about it. Which I don’t.
Pugh is the glue that keeps Don’t Worry Darling moving through its 1950s world of patriarchal domesticity. She is unsurprisingly good as an unravelling housewife, albeit one far closer to Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers than Meryl Streep in The Hours. Pugh has chemistry with just about everyone, most prominently herself. Scenes where she has little to act opposite that her reflection show off her magnetism as a performer. As her husband, a role that probably should have gone to somebody like Evan Peters, Harry Styles leaves little of an impression beyond a fluctuating accent. It should be noted that I felt Wilde was also quite good in a key supporting role.
Wilde proves here that she has the ability to churn out the sort of sturdy mid-range studio programming that was once so common from Hollywood, but which is in dramatically low supply as of 2022. As rare non-IP material to permeate the larger pop culture landscape, Don’t Worry Darling is a decently enjoyable film. It’s just a shame it preferences cool over logical, with under-cooked ideas at its core.