Alice (Florence Pugh) is just one of the many bored housewives that toil about home cleaning and cooking while her husband, Jack (Harry Styles), is at work at the mysterious Victory Project.  The women of the company town’s cul-de-sac abbreviate their chores with neighborhood gossip, and the topic du jour is Margaret (KiKi Layne) who, in an apparent manic episode, took her son into the surrounding desert, a place warned by the men to be dangerous, and the boy never returned.  The neighborhood chalks it up to an unfortunate incident, but soon Alice begins having strange visions and hallucinations and worries that the cause of it has something to do with the secretive Victory Project. 

Olivia Wilde returns to the director’s seat with Don’t Worry Darling, a light erotic thriller rewritten by Katie Silberman after the script’s acquisition from The Black List and released by Warner Brothers.  The highly anticipated sophomore outing from the Booksmart (2019) director debuted at the Venice Film Festival and the mild reaction was quickly eclipsed by the red-carpet drama between the cast.  While it is true that sometimes any publicity is good publicity, the spat seemed to take much of the wind out of the sails for this release, doing more legwork than the actual marketing campaign resulting in a sense that this is the must-see trainwreck of the fall instead of a thriller that you just gotta see it to believe it. 

Despite the marketing focusing on Styles’ involvement in the film, Don’t Worry Darling is shouldered by Pugh who occupies just about every scene of the 122-minute film.  As the mental games and gaslighting continue, Pugh’s performance begins to show shades of her character Dani, from Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). While she does not bring much new to her turn as Alice, there is no denying that Pugh is the captivating hook that keeps audiences invested in the mystery of the California company town. Silberman’s script keeps Alice in the dark for most of the film so that audiences can unravel the Victory Project plot with her, but the constant gaslighting from the men in her life quickly grows wearisome, and while it fits nicely into the trope of the 1950s lifestyle where the women should be seen and not heard, the complete reliance on that dynamic leaves a sour taste in the mouths of modern audiences. 

Opposite Pugh’s Alice is her husband, Jack, in Styles’ first leading role. Like the rest of the film, Styles’ performance is aggressively mediocre, partly due to him still being so baby-faced that he really cannot sell menacing other than by just raising his voice, and partly because he shares almost no chemistry with his on-screen wife. There are glimmers of talent that shine through in the late part of the film as a man in crisis, and with a stronger script and more solid direction, a leading man could be cultivated out of him yet. As it stands, the performance on screen is quite rudimentary. While the promotion for the film hinged on his sex appeal that he crafted through his music career, those who were going just to see the former One Direction star will find themselves disappointed firstly by his lack of screen time and secondly by the lack of a strong mystery in the film. 

The big reveal, which the film finally starts actively building towards across a tense dinner scene late in the second act, does not hold up to any tests of scrutiny. It is ripe with imagery, and the production design led by Katie Byron does an excellent job at posing questions and breeding suspense, but many of the motifs set up in the first act ultimately lead nowhere. For example, the source of Alice’s hallucination is ultimately revealed, but the plane crash which triggers her own descent into madness is not only not explained, but it does not fit in logically with the reveal of the film. The same can be said about the hollow eggs that Alice frantically cracks through while she is trying to prepare a meal. It is unsettling imagery used solely because of its unsettling nature, in the same way, that many of the scenes of Alice’s hallucination are there simply because they are unsettling and do not connect or jive with the overall narrative once everything has been revealed. They strike a nerve with audiences, but there are no layers to peel back revealing a greater understanding of the world of the film. To end as abruptly as the film does, it either needed to be trimmed by about 20-30 minutes to avoid being so half-baked, otherwise, it needed to make good on all of the setups. As is, it is just too weak of an idea and a conclusion – and one that at its core has been seen time and time again – to gain ground as a strong entry into the incredibly tough genre of psychological thrillers. 

This abandonment of the big reveal leads to the major question that will haunt whatever discourse around Don’t Worry Darling remains long after the memory of the alleged spit take fades from memory, and this is simply: what is the point? Ambiguity is a great thing for stories, but without enough clarity of intention, the message of the film will get lost. The film is clearly trying to say something, and Wilde has gone on record stating its feminist thesis though your mileage may vary on how effective that messaging is because as far as film language is concerned, the film really struggles to get the words out. There feels to be intention behind the casting of the film, and there are just too many instances where the script seems to be trying to investigate the sense of otherness, like when Violet moves into the neighborhood and is immediately ostracized by the other ladies in the ballet class, or later, the fetishization of other cultures, when we meet Frank’s (Chris Pine) wife Shelly (Gemma Chan), that the casting choices made are pure coincidence. The most prominent and damning example is Layne’s Margaret, one of the few people of color in the film, who is painted early on as the crazy lady. But then the film goes on to comment on Styles’ British accent, though it does so in a chummy, joking manner whereas when the women of the town do not fit squarely into the mold, it is highlighted as a flaw evidenced further by how quickly Violet is accepted into the fold while Margaret remains a source of ire for the wives club.   

Don’t Worry Darling will go down as a bold swing and a miss, though its mere existence should be admired as a mid-budget, original – albeit, uninspired – idea that received a full, wide release right out of the gate from a major studio. It is big and messy but it is at least a fun feast for the eyes to take in all of the bright colors of 1950s catalog homewares and a few neat camera shots that play with symmetry in the frame in a very pleasing way. It would actually be quite pleasant to watch if it were not for the soundscape of the film, an auditory assault with all the popular needle drops of the era that dances on and off with a score that is so unsure of what it wants to be, that just listening to the film alone causes enough stress and anxiety without trying. It can hopefully serve as a project that Wilde can rebound from for her next feature now that she has worked in a larger, connected narrative. Booksmart, while containing a throughline, was more a collection of sketches, whereas Don’t Worry Darling is not only a longer film, but it also germinates from a single idea throughout its duration never wavering in its search for answers. While it does not quite come together for Wilde here, it does not feel fair to write it off completely as just bad, but rather deeply flawed, and with any luck it will be seen as a pivotal entry for the better in Wilde’s eventual oeuvre.