Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

After all the offscreen drama that surrounded the Venice Film Festival premiere of Don’t Worry Darling, you would have expected a dumpster fire of a movie. But it isn’t that. While Olivia Wilde’s sophomore directorial outing (after 2019’s Booksmart) isn’t an entirely satisfying thriller, it’s also not exactly a dud. Think of it as a cake taken from the oven too early (my baking skills are nonexistent, but this analogy is a real thing, right?).

It is the late 1950s, and we are introduced to the experimental corporate community of Victory, Calif., a desert oasis of well-tended homes and manicured lawns Lorded over by a charismatic visionary CEO named Frank (Chris Pine), the close-knit families of this seemingly blissful suburbia routinely get together for weekend cookouts and dinner parties. Come Monday morning, the dutiful, impeccably coiffed wives kiss their hubbies goodbye before going on to dance class and lounging by the pool. The menfolk hop into their candy-colored sportscars and disappear into the desert for their top-secret work at something called the Victory Project.

Among the happy inhabitants are Alice and Jack Chambers (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles). Alice spends her days tidying up their mid-century modern home and gossiping with best pal Bunny (Wilde). At night, the childless couple have spectacular movie-ready sex atop the dining room table.

But hold on to your fedora, kids, because — and I hope you won’t be too shocked by this — all is not as it seems in Victory.

Alice finds herself growing … well, unsettled. Like another troubled housewife (KiKi Layne) in their little clique, Alice has occasional hallucinations and simmering anxieties that persist despite the tranquilizers fed her by Victory’s resident doctor (Timothy Simons). Then Alice strays into the desert, against the express rules of Victory. Things start to go very awry … at least until a Big Reveal.

I won’t say any more about that ostensible twist, except to grouse that it is both obvious and dumb, more knot than twist. 

What does work —or, to be exact, who does work — is Florence Pugh. Not only does she deliver the best performance in Don’t Warry Darling, she arguably gives the only performance aside from Pine’s uber-polished Frank. One of the finest actors of her generation, Pugh lends an electrifying urgency that commands our interest despite a one-trick script by Katie Silberman that offers one tease after another. Styles, who came on to the project after Shia LaBeouf dropped out (the reasons are of some dispute), demonstrates he should stick to singing.

But back to that not not-fully-formed cake …. There are tantalizing strands of an engaging movie here. In the post-MeToo world, Don’t Worry Darling tweaks the notion of a patriarchy slipping from power and pining (Chris Pining?) for a traditionalist America of yesteryear. The production values are top-notch, particularly the set design and cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s eye-popping use of color.

Even so, we are left to recall The Stepford Wives, Pleasantville, The Truman Show and dozens of other films that harvested similar terrain to much greater effect.