Don’t Worry Darling Review: Florence Pugh and Harry Styles Anchor This Twisty Feminist Film
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The post Don’t Worry Darling Review: Florence Pugh and Harry Styles Anchor This Twisty Feminist Film appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: Alice Warren (Florence Pugh)’s life looks perfect, living as she does in a 1950s desert paradise called Victory. She’s got a beautiful home to take care of, her husband Jack (Harry Styles) is loving and (ahem) very attentive, her friends are a gas, and as Victory Project founder Frank (Chris Pine) keeps saying, she and her fellow wives are helping their husbands change the world with their mysterious work.
But sometimes, Alice suspects that there’s something going on that no one talks about, perhaps connected to the strange hallucinations she can’t shake, or how a former friend (KiKi Layne) has become moody and isolated following the loss of her son, or just a growing sense that someone — everyone, maybe — is lying to her…
At Least No One Was Dead the Whole Time: Director Olivia Wilde’s sophomore film is a much more ambitious effort than the very charming Booksmart, a beautifully made little thriller that primarily suffers from the burden of its premise. For the type of narrative with which Don’t Worry Darling is playing dates back to the era in which it’s set (which is to say, it’s decades old at this point), and at this point, releasing a movie like this in a culture that’s seen too many Twilight Zone episodes and M. Night Shyamalan movies just means that the audience is too aware of the shoe about to drop.
But what saves the film is the truth of said shoe, which is hard to discuss without spoilers, but deserves to be respected for just how nasty it is. Katie Silberman’s script keeps things very oblique, relying more on scattered distinct details than vague generalizations to give just enough information to understand what’s happened. But once you do get an impressionistic sense of the truth’s full scope, it sticks with you, especially given its lingering unanswered questions.
Keep Calm and Carry On: Florence Pugh is only 26 years old, with her earliest acting credit going back to 2014, but in that time she’s quickly ascended to the ranks of stardom, having carried a number of other films prior to this one and thus bringing to the screen a natural confidence in her work. She’s captivating as ever here, bringing the necessary raw energy to Alice’s most extreme moments.
And Harry Styles continues his forward movement as an actor with an impressive level of commitment, especially during the film’s darkest moments. It doesn’t feel like he’s quite gained the ability to completely immerse himself into a role yet — the script makes some direct accommodations for his accent (though there’s a fun additional twist on that) — but he proves adept at selling himself as a young clean-cut paragon of 1950s manhood, when not being goaded by Pine into tap-dancing for a crowd.
Don’t Worry Darling (Warner Bros.)
Pugh, Styles, and Wilde have soaked up a lot of the attention around this film (and you really have to appreciate what a challenge it was for Wild, directing whilst in full costume — as she’s talked about in interviews, when someone like Ben Affleck stars in his own movies, he’s not doing so in a full damn corset). But it’s a much deeper ensemble than that, with fantastic supporting performances from Pine, KiKi Layne, Timothy Simons, Nick Kroll, Gemma Chan, Asif Ali, and more.
Also, we really don’t deserve Kate Berlant, who’s become a real MVP this year as both a supporting actress — she’s a true delight in Prime Video’s A League of Their Own — as well as in her own comedy specials.
Making a Home: Figuring out what’s really going on in Victory should be a draw for audiences, but on a filmmaking level there’s a lot to appreciate here. Anyone who’s been to Palm Springs or the surrounding towns is familiar with that mid-20th century architecture, the clean lines and sharp angles standing out in sharp contrast to the vibrant, rough desert all around you. It can be a very surreal place, which is perhaps why it’s a popular vacation destination, and also the perfect setting for a story like this, where one’s grasp on reality can be fleeting.
In terms of the film’s look, everything’s impeccable in Victory, so impeccable that it’s only when you get a glimpse of the world outside the town that you realize how masterful a job production designer Katie Byron has done. And Wilde’s blending of Matthew Libatique’s surrealist cinematography, Affonso Gonçalves’s sometimes-elegant/sometimes-jarring editing, and John Powell’s haunting score creates exactly the sort of paranoid vibe a film like this needs — the vibe that the audience is expecting.
The Verdict: A pernicious bit of propaganda that floats throughout Don’t Worry Darling, and comes directly from real conversations around what we talk about when we talk about “homemakers,” is that Alice and her fellow housewives are partners with their husbands, that their cooking and cleaning and other wifely duties are all in service to a greater cause, a societal need that makes their sacrifices as valuable as their husbands’ own efforts.
How this thread eventually unravels in the film — the ways in which that whole concept is declared bullshit — proves fascinating by the end. Consumed in a vacuum, the fact that there are unanswered questions to be asked after watching Don’t Worry Darling is perhaps the most exciting part of the narrative, opening the film up for debates similar to those which accompany the release of Christopher Nolan movies.
Of course that probably won’t happen, at least with the same fervor, because Don’t Worry Darling has found itself in the middle of a very strange news cycle, where a smart, well-made movie that’s in large part about the fucked-up ways in which men can treat women has gotten a lot of media attention because of the personal life of its female director. The irony’s so blinding, you gotta wear shades.
While Don’t Worry Darling isn’t perfect, the only baggage it deserves to be saddled with is the baggage of attempting to tell a story with an obvious twist in our twist-numbed culture. For in the end, the real twist is this: even in 2022, true equality between men and women still feels like a fairy tale.
Where to Watch: Don’t Worry Darling arrives in theaters on Friday, September 23rd.
Trailer:
Don’t Worry Darling Review: Florence Pugh and Harry Styles Anchor This Twisty Feminist Film
Liz Shannon Miller
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