Wasting The Perfect Shit Storm: ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ A Review

Movies are funny, aren’t they? There’s something wildly comforting about sitting in a dark room full of strangers and staring at a screen, hoping it’s worth the time, effort and popcorn you’ve poured into making it to that moment a reality. Sometimes you have a good time and sometimes you don’t.  ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ unfortunately falls squarely into the latter of those experiences. I’d invest in a longer introduction but this film has wasted enough of my time already so let’s just get on with it.

Don’t Worry Darling is the latest film by Olivia Wilde starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles and Chris Pine. We follow Pugh as a housewife in an idyllic 1950s community figuring out that something about her perfect world isn’t so perfect after all. 

Florence Pugh does a fantastic job playing the character of Alice. Her performance is emotional and it brings a lot of depth to a character that really needed it. She has too good a grip on what she’s doing by the looks of it and as always I’m excited to see what she’s in next. 

I also did enjoy the aesthetic of the film. The sterile, glamorous 50s look of the film gives it that cinematic quality that I’m assuming is what Harry Styles was referring to in that one interview. 

Some scenes are genuinely creepy and the feeling of dread is palpable throughout. The mood is well and truly built up in certain scenes. 

And that’s about all the good stuff that I have to say about this movie. 

A bit of a rant

The most egregious crime that this movie commits is putting its audience through a script that lacks clarity and the conviction to pull off something truly outstanding. It is bloated, doesn’t offer a conclusion of any sort, sets the audience up for failure and doesn’t lead anywhere. 

Don’t Worry Darling is a great example of a film that had just about everything going for it except its script. A script that is its eventual downfall and leaves the audience hanging on one too many occasions. 

Normally I’d just list out all the stuff I didn’t like here and leave it at that but on this occasion specifically, I feel the need to get into spoilers and rant a little. So this is your warning. Spoilers!

Speaking of Spoilers

If you’ve watched ‘The Matrix’, you’ve watched a more stylistically evolved film tackling almost the same plot. Except this film is also about control over women and their bodies and their lives. 

This film is frustrating because it gives its main characters so little to do. It’s like someone got stuck writing this film and didn’t know how to get to the ending naturally so they just threw it together hastily and now you have a movie that’s the equivalent of a carelessly thrown together Tuesday night sandwich. 

Like someone just didn’t want to try to make this a little better. 

The idea that none of this is real is such an uninteresting concept to me because it’s been done before and beaten to death. 

What it almost got right

In my opinion this film would have benefited from leaning into its horror elements. It would make a great horror movie but they’d have to change the entire third act. The idea that maybe what’s happening in Victory is bigger than men controlling their wives. Because while that is horrifying it’s simply not enough of a revelation. 

I’m going to make an unnecessary comparison here to the 2021 film, ‘Last Night in Soho’, directed by Edgar Wright. Also a film plagued with inconsistencies and plot elements that turned frustrating over time, that’s a film that manages to utilize the atmosphere it creates. It loves its aesthetic but also incorporates it sufficiently into the larger story. Don’t Worry Darling wastes its extensive setup and seeing how 75% of this film is setup by the end I was more annoyed with the film for wasting my time than I was for its mediocrity. 

The other issue here is that of Frank (Chris Pine’s character) as the architect of this reality and worldbuilding in general. Frank is supposed to be smart, he’s revered by everyone in the film but when you actually recap the events of the film in your head you realize that he simply isn’t? That comes down to the worldbuilding, the world doesn’t work so neither does Frank. There’s plot holes everywhere you look and it’s all stuff that could have been cleaned up in a rewrite. 

Conclusion

Wasted potential is always frustrating but especially here because it had the perfect shitstorm in terms of the conversation surrounding the film. Can you imagine the impact this film could have had, culturally, if it worked even a little? 

As it stands, the possibility of Harry Styles maybe having spit on Chris Pine is still the most interesting thing about this film.