In “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022, directed by Olivia Wilde) everything is fake.
The film is set in the experimental idealized town of Victory in the 1950s. While the husbands work on a top secret project, the wives stay home and enjoy the bliss and debauchery of their seemingly perfect paradise.
The movie is filled to the brim with colorful aesthetics and glimmering visuals. Domestic bliss is the background, with the characters of Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) at the center of it.
The candy-colored world under Wilde’s directive hand seems like it’ll be a worthwhile watch, but the film quickly takes a turn for the worse after the first fifteen minutes.
The idyllic town features Alice and her husband Jack, her neighbors Dean (Nick Kroll) and Bunny (Olivia Wilde), and the other residents of Victory who all have clean-cut suits and beautiful smiles. Victory is uniform and flawless to the unblinking eye. However, beneath the guise of the faux glamor and the party girl personality of Alice, something is amiss.
The main character, Alice begins to unwind like a tangled ball of yarn finally untangling. With every confused glance and question she ponders, the audience is meant to do the same. The audience is asked to look beyond the surface, to question every glance, spoken dialogue, and object in frame.
Alice questions the world she’s in as we do and with every following scene, there is a paranoia that settles and only worsens with the music used in the background.
While Wilde asks the audience to analyze the world around them and the world onscreen, it’s difficult not to feel like something is missing. The performances of the film deliver as much as the visuals, but the plot is close to nonexistent.
Time in this film moves differently, despite the out-of-place feeling brought upon by 1950s manufactured cars, music, and aesthetic styling, time plays no active role in the story, and it is as lost as the plot.
One could say the progression of Alice coming to learn the truth is plot enough, but the story does not follow along as it should.
In Wilde’s feminist gothic psychological thriller, the audience is asked to question the patriarchy as well as other themes present in the story, and much like the plot, the attempt at this also falls flat.
Women are trapped by men, made to clean and cook and look pretty. Meant to be regarded as decorative pieces of an elaborate play of color and symmetry. But while we notice this, there is no analysis we can make.
Furthermore, the truth about the Victory Project is a snooze fest. It’s bland, it’s boring, and it makes the audience sit back and ask, “Wow. Really?! That’s it?” But that’s an accurate summary of what audiences would think once the movie ends.
“Don’t Worry Darling” had potential. It had a star-studded cast, a beautiful set, and near-perfect costume styling, but it lacked in many of the components that were supposed to matter. The problem is: That’s about it.