'Don't Worry Darling' review: Visually stunning, but unsatisfying
(L-r) HARRY STYLES as Jack and FLORENCE PUGH as Alice in New Line Cinema’s “DON’T WORRY DARLING,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
PLOT In a seemingly perfect suburb, a young housewife uncovers a dark secret.
CAST Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde
RATED R (explicit sex and some violence)
LENGTH 2:02
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE An ambitious dystopian thriller that falls short of its ideal.
In “Don’t Worry Darling,” a contented housewife begins to suspect that her life is not what it seems. The film’s director, Olivia Wilde, may know the feeling.
The publicity campaign for “Don’t Worry Darling,” Wilde’s follow-up to 2019’s “Booksmart,” has turned into a volcano of Hollywood gossip. The film’s star, Florence Pugh, has been noticeably absent from interviews; Wilde’s romance with her other star, pop singer Harry Styles, keeps making tabloid headlines; and there’s a jumped-or-pushed debate over Shia LaBeouf, whom Styles replaced. Even Wilde’s divorce from Jason Sudeikis is back under scrutiny. All of which has spurred intense interest in the film despite lukewarm early reviews.
As it happens, “Don’t Worry Darling” is neither disaster nor masterpiece. Visually, it’s a stunner — as sumptuous a movie as any you’re likely to see this year. The story it tries to tell, however, never gels in a satisfying way.
Styles and Pugh are excellent as the amorous married couple Jack and Alice Chambers, but the real stars here are the lavish production and costume design. The utopian suburb where the Chambers live, Victory, is suspended in the 1950s, a Mid-Mod cornucopia of ranch-style homes with geometric light fixtures. The women wear billowing dresses, the men wear two-tone bowling shirts, everyone's giddy on cocktails. Out in the nearby desert is a bunker where Jack and the other husbands commute in tail-finned cars to work on a top-secret project.
It's all thanks to an Orwellian guru named Frank (a very good Chris Pine), whose frequent speeches are both inspirational and vague — something about changing the world with “progressive materials.” Meanwhile, Alice’s role as the happy homemaker begins to feel empty (she cracks an egg but finds nothing inside) and her daily chores literally close in on her (a window she’s cleaning slowly crushes her against the wall). These scenes are intriguing, if heavy-handed; we didn’t need a subliminal glimpse of a Sylvia Plath book to get the message.
Wilde deserves credit for reworking “The Stepford Wives” for a new millennium, just as Jordan Peele did with “Get Out.” The underdeveloped screenplay by Katie Silberman, however, saps the movie of tension and suspense. Alice’s hallucinations aren’t real, so she’s rarely in any real danger, and her supposed nemesis, Frank, mostly just hovers around looking arrogant. Supporting actors such as Gemma Chan (as Frank’s imperious wife) and Wilde herself (as Bunny, the queen bee of the cul-de-sac), tend to fade into the background.
For all its flaws — including a familiar-feeling twist ending — “Don’t Worry Darling” should establish Wilde as a truly ambitious and inventive filmmaker. In a perfect world, we’ll be seeing much more from her.
