27 Unanswered Questions And Plot Holes In "Don't Worry Darling" That Have Been Keeping Me Awake At Night
WARNING: Major spoilers for Don't Worry Darling ahead! Continue at your own peril.
ABC Network / Via giphy.com
Olivia Wilde's visually stunning masterpiece has been dividing audiences since it hit theaters.
Led by a ridiculously talented Florence Pugh, this Stepford Wives–esque feminist dystopia flick seems to be very much a case of love or hate when it comes to audience reception.
The film is chock-full of twists and turns, so it's no wonder that many left the cinema scratching their heads.
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
I thought I mostly understood what was going on, but even after trawling the internet for hours, I can't find answers to some things. Were they plot holes? Did I miss something? Did the writers miss something in between the chopping and changing from the original script?
Well, let's get to it. If you have answers to any of the questions that have been keeping me awake at night, please let me know in the comments!
And one last reminder: heavy spoilers below!
1.So, first question: Jack is unemployed in the flashback, so how is he affording the rent, bills, and fee he mentions to stay in Victory?
In one of the flashbacks, Jack asks how he's supposed to "take care" of Alice, and she comforts him by saying he'll find another job and she can pick up extra shifts at the hospital to cover the costs. He doesn't do this, and her long hours drive a wedge between them.
It's implied that she's the main breadwinner and works around the clock to afford their basic bills while he stays home listening to Frank's podcast, yet they still struggle to stay afloat on her salary alone.
So how is his salary (which is implied to be less than hers) funding everything they paid for previously, as well as the fee to stay in the Victory simulation, which Jack mentions when he says he has to go out to work in a job he hates so that Alice can stay in Victory?
2.How did Jack get Alice into the simulation to begin with?
We know that poor real Alice is lying prone on her bed and that she wasn't aware Victory was a simulation until she went digging.
She's certainly not happy to be there, so it's doubtful that she willingly entered (then just forgot she was in a simulation). Did Jack attack her in her sleep or forcibly insert her into the simulation another way?
In the original script, the pair hadn't just grown apart but were actually divorced, adding an extra layer of creepiness to the whole thing.
3.What are those rumblings?!
There's earth tremor–esque rumbles where Jack and Alice have to hold jars of spices on the shelves to make sure they don't fall down. They do this automatically, as if it's a regular occurrence. But what the rumblings are is never explained.
If they're caused by something in Jack and Alice's apartment, why do the other residents also feel the rumblings? It looks as if real-life Jack and Alice are in their preexisting apartment outside of the simulation, so the residents aren't grouped together in one facility somewhere.
If it's the men leaving the simulation, why does it happen when Jack is with Alice and we then see all the husbands leaving in unison afterward? If it's something the men are doing at work, as Peg implies, do they work on the software that upholds the Victory simulation in the real world?
Maybe it's some kind of software update being applied to Victory, but it's never actually explained, so it's been ping-ponging around my brain for days. Make it make sense, please!
4.Okay, slightly gross, but if Alice is strapped to the bed indefinitely, how does she go to the bathroom and stay in the simulation?
We know Jack goes into the real world, drips water into Alice's mouth, and gives her nutrients via an IV line, but there's no way she didn't need a bathroom break during the time the movie took place.
Does he unplug her, take her off the bed and to the toilet, then wipe her memory again afterward? Is the equipment to get her into the simulation portable, meaning that Jack can plonk her onto the toilet while she's in Victory? Or does she just kinda go in the bed? Or special undies?
Granted, it wouldn't be a glamorous scene to show, but...I just need to know, okay?!
5.How do her eyes stay moist for that long when they're clamped open?!
Warner Bros. / Via giphy.com
I know there's the little scene where you see Jack dripping water in her mouth, and I can't remember if he added eye drops, too. But either way, she lies there prone literally 24/7 with her eyes clamped open, à la A Clockwork Orange.
It's implied that Jack goes to work, so he probably isn't in the apartment with her actual body; then he returns to the simulation immediately after work until he leaves again in the morning — so presumably from about 5 or 6 p.m. to maybe like 7 or 8 a.m. the next day.
Even if he works from home and can check in on her throughout the day, he's lying there next to her for hours when he returns to the simulation, so how are their eyes especially not drier than the Sahara?! And if he's got some magical super-strength eye drops, can he please share with the class?!
6.Speaking of unexplained health questions, how is Peg constantly pregnant?
I know, I know, it's a simulation; she could be pregnant forever. But if the husbands want it to be a realistic simulation and they only wipe the "inconvenient" memories from the wives' minds, wouldn't anyone be concerned about perpetually pregnant Peg? (Say that three times fast!)
Of course, it could just be a turn of phrase — maybe Peg got pregnant quickly after having her last child, meaning that she seems to have been pregnant for ages. But what if real-life Peg was pregnant and that's why her simulation self is pregnant? What happens when she needs to give birth in the real world? Or did her husband ask for Peg's simulation to be pregnant in Victory, but Peg actually isn't in real life?
Ugh, I don't know. I just need to know.
7.And talking about kids, did Bunny's kids appear on day one with Bunny and her husband, or did she go through pregnancy and birth in Victory?
How does it work if the real-life child isn't clamped to a bed like their parents and is purely a simulation, as Bunny says the kids are?
Did Bunny and her hubs have to put in a request for two brand-new simulated kids who look exactly like their real kids, please and thank you? Or is it more like The Sims and they had to WooHoo, then wait for the stork to arrive, then raise the kids from babies??
8.Another thing with Bunny: If she is fully cognizant of being in a simulation and entered willingly because she wanted the illusion of being with her kids after the real-life children unfortunately passed away, why would she want her memory to retain the fact that her Victory kids are not real and her real kids are dead?
Maybe this is out of respect to her real-life children, and a way to preserve their memory while trying to live in a sort of blissful ignorance with the simulated children in Victory?
9.So many Bunny questions. How is it that Bunny knows everything the men know, but no one has dragged her off for shock therapy to reset her brain into submissive-housewife mode? Is it because she willingly embodies the role anyway?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
Does Frank know that Bunny knows all? Can women willingly apply for and enter Victory with a male sponsor of sorts? (I might have an answer for this toward the end of my next question, actually.)
10.What does a promotion in Victory actually mean?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
So Jack gets promoted to the senior advisory board from his previous role as a technical engineer. He is given a fancy lil' ring and essentially has a little marriage ceremony to his job, complete with the most bizarre first dance you've ever seen.
But Jack implies that when the men go off to work, they go off to crappy jobs in the real world that they don't like. So are the job titles in Victory just a show of status for the wives, and a way for the men to see who's the most alpha?
Or do they perhaps go off to jobs in the real world and actually work on things to do with the Victory Project? But then that sends me down another spiral of questions, because it's implied that Jack is an unemployed layabout, and surely a job to do with a highly sophisticated life simulation needs a lot of technical skill and experience? I suppose maybe he could be doing something like onboarding new members online.
Another theory I have is that Jack and the other men are rewarded for turning their women in if they start to remember things and break the role of the perfect housewife. Jack gets his promotion after Alice gets to HQ and mysteriously wakes up at home in her bed with hazy memories. It's likely because she returned to her body in the real world, Jack realized she'd found out his secret, and he forcibly put her back in and commissioned the mind wipe.
This might explain why Bunny's husband, Bill, gets his own ring near the start, and why Bunny goes from very pro-Victory to suddenly telling Alice they're in a simulation near the end of the film. Perhaps her memories keep coming back and Bill keeps sending her off for memory wipes, but she doesn't mind because it means her grief for her real-life children stays at bay?
BUT NO ONE TELLS US WHAT THE JOB TITLES ACTUALLY MEAN, SO MY MIND IS JUST GONNA KEEP LOOPING HERE.
11.Why is no one looking for Alice?!
I don't know how long she's been in the simulation, but in the flashback to their real lives, she tells him she's just done a 30-hour shift and has six hours before she needs to be back on duty, so it seems like she's pretty darn busy, and it would be noticed if she just disappeared out of the blue one day.
Maybe this is an oversight by the writers when they changed the original script, because the first draft had the husbands fake their wives' deaths before entering the simulation so that no one would come looking for the wives trapped constantly in Victory while the men portaled in and out.
12.Why is there no sort of firewall around the Victory Headquarters if it's an exit point?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
I get that the wives are manipulated into being super submissive, so their husbands telling them not to go to HQ should be enough of a safeguard. But surely after Margaret, Frank would have put some kind of precautionary measure in place for unruly wives? Even just a password-protected fence?!
Maybe the hallucination Alice has of Jack saying "Don't leave me" when she's almost at the exit point is a final safeguard to manipulate her into turning back? Still, seems pretty weak.
13.Oh, and how did Alice suddenly become a badass stunt driver when the women say they can't drive and Jack is still teaching Alice?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
I know she knows how to drive a car, but it was implied that she was a learner, and that driving was something else!
I do have one theory: The women make it clear that they don't know how to drive, and it's likely their real modern-world selves would, so their memory of driving must be erased to stop them from driving to the same exit point as the men do each morning. So that's a safeguard to stop the women from escaping via that route, but the security on the other exit that Alice touches to escape still seems pretty lax.
Anyway, I digress. Alice's memories are coming back when she's driving for her life, so maybe she was a darn good driver in the real world and that all came flooding back?
14.When Alice is careering toward HQ in a high-speed chase, why did Frank seem so chill on the phone?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
He was so blasé — he could have been on hold to renew his phone contract, for how interested he looked. Was he just overly confident that Alice would be caught, or does he have safeguarding measures in place on the other side to stop her real-life self from snitching on his little misogynistic utopia?
15.Do people have jobs in Victory, or are they simulations?
Like the men in red and the bus driver man? Do these men maybe share Frank's ideology but haven't found a woman to forcibly domesticate, so they just exist in peripheral roles until they can enter the inner circle?
Or are they more like NPCs (nonplayable characters) in video games, programmed to have only a certain number of interactions with the characters? It would explain why the bus driver man refused to go off route and didn't seem to know how to respond to Alice's shouting about helping the people in the plane crash — he is literally not programmed to understand, and Alice was essentially messing up the code of the simulation.
Likewise, it could be why Frank was only told that the doctor was dead, when there were several men in red who would have died in the same crash.
16.Is the electroshock therapy in real life or in the simulation?
When she gets carted off by the red men, does her simulated self get a factory reboot while the electroshock therapy happens to real-life Alice? Otherwise, why couldn't she just stay with Jack instead of arranging for staff to come and collect her, since she wouldn't remember anyway? What happens to sim Alice?
The electroshock stuff must happen in real life so the simulated self can accept their surroundings as real, hence why the return of Alice's real memories seems to mess with the simulation. But does that mean that real-life Jack has to let the men in red into their apartment? And if so, surely they'll bash the door in and get to Alice pretty quick after she escapes Victory (especially since she's strapped to the bed) — unless it takes longer to rally the troops to get to her after Frank's death?
There's so many "ifs."
17.Olivia Wilde herself has confirmed that the men are supposed to be incels. So why is it that all the sex scenes are very much about Alice's pleasure and not Jack's?
Olivia boasted that only female orgasms were seen in the film, but if she intended for the men to be incels who believe women should stay home, cook, clean, look pretty, and provide them with sexual pleasure, why does Jack prioritize Alice's pleasure and seemingly go without?
The flashback of Jack and Alice in the real world shows him being annoyed with her after she returns from a 30-hour shift because she hasn't cooked him dinner (even though he's been in the house all day), and then looking hard done by when she shrugs off his affections to go to bed because she's exhausted and has to be back at work in six hours, so the foundations for the character's incel nature were definitely being laid...but some things just don't add up.
I guess it could just be a sort of power play/ego trip? He knows he won't be rejected in Victory, so while Alice might turn him down in their home, she won't say no even at somewhere inappropriate, like a work party, because she's basically programmed not to?
I doubt he's doing it because he feels guilty for trapping her, since he genuinely seems to believe he's given her a happy life and seems not to feel any remorse for throwing her into Victory without her consent.
My last guess is somewhat gross. If Jack has sex in the simulation, his real-life body might be a bit...messy when he reunites with it?
18.When Jack and Alice were, ahem, having fun at Frank's party and Alice saw Frank watching them, why didn't she stop?!
Or at least jump a little bit in shock at seeing her husband's boss arrive while they were getting jiggy with it?!
Was Alice getting some kind of exhibitionist kick out of it, or had Frank done something with the women simulations that would keep them placated if he did decide to be a creep and watch them in intimate moments?
19.How do medications, alcohol, and food work in Victory?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
The simulations of the women continually make extravagant spreads of food, but we know that their real-life versions get nutrients via IV lines, so it's implied that the food in Victory doesn't nourish their real-life bodies. We also saw Jack downing a tin of tuna in the real world.
Near the start, we see the main characters drinking, and pregnant Peg's husband says she needs more alcohol because it's good for the baby, which is another reason I think the food and drink have no real impact — it's all just another line in the code of the simulation. (Or maybe Peg's not really pregnant? Now we're back at question 6 again...)
So my question is, if they don't get any sort of nutrients/effects from food or alcohol, what would have happened if Margaret or Alice had taken the medications they were offered? Would the drugs actually have done anything, or would they have been more of a placebo? Or are they more sinister, perhaps like a little antivirus scan to fix the bug in the sim's code and make them nice and docile again?
I just have so many questions.
20.Why does it seem as if there's some kind of tension with or fear of Shelley when she first enters the dance class?
There was a real air of tension among the women when Shelley walked into the ballet class. I thought she was going to be an antagonist, but she seemed pretty pleasant for the rest of the film (ya know, until she stabbed her husband).
What was that all about? Maybe it's just because she's the big boss's wife, so they're on their best behavior.
21.Why does Frank say that he likes the challenge Alice presents to him, while it's implied that Margaret was a nuisance for doing the same thing?
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
Was he just trying to push Alice because she's almost like a computer virus and he wants to see what havoc she can wreak — while feeling confident that he can "fix" her afterward — so that he can create better solutions to keep the wives docile in the future?
22.Why was the doctor carrying around Margaret's file with literally all of the information redacted?
Why even keep the file? Why wouldn't he have shredded it if it became so secret or of no use, instead of carrying it round in his briefcase?
Or is there something in the coding for the women sims that prevents them from reading certain things? And if they've thought to go to that level of detail to protect the Victory Project's secrets, then, again, WHY is there not more security around the exit portal to prevent women from escaping and exposing the whole thing?!
23.What did Shelley mean when she said, "It's my turn now"? What was her plan when she stabbed Frank?
Did she overhear his phone call and realize that Alice was telling the truth about the women being trapped in Victory? Did it anger her enough to kill him for revenge? But that is a suuuuper-quick turnaround from what looked like fawning adoration to cold-blooded murder if she really only realized then and there.
Maybe she was aware of it all and perhaps didn't like it but didn't have much choice in it. It makes sense that as Frank's wife, she may have been the first test subject for Victory. Over the years of watching women be forced into the simulation without their knowledge or consent, she may have grown tired of Frank's scheme and been plotting his downfall.
So maybe "It's my turn now" is Shelley seizing the opportunity that Alice presented, taking out Frank and maybe plotting a Victory that's kinder to women?
I don't know. And I really need to!
24.What are the horror-esque bits (like where Alice is getting crushed against the glass) all about?
Is it because Alice's memories are coming back and she's starting to question her reality, creating a distance between the world she's being told she's seeing and the real world she's actually in?
Is it because she subconsciously feels trapped, so maybe that's what the window smooshing scene was trying to demonstrate?
Is her remembering things mucking up her simulated self's code and causing strange glitches? Or is Frank programming a series of torments from behind his computer screen, tricking her into thinking she's losing her mind so she'll submit to the electroshock therapy?
25.Why did no one think it was odd that the whole town had the exact same specific meet-cute, and everyone came from or honeymooned at three particular locations?
Like, why did people only notice that when Alice pointed it out? I would definitely remember if I'd met my partner via something as specific as them picking up my train ticket and handing it to me, and then several of my friends said that the exact same thing happened to them on the same train. Why wouldn't Frank create a wider range of backstories?
Maybe all the wives have had multiple rounds of electroshock therapy, and the return of the memories is a regular occurrence that the men "fix" each time? That would explain why Peg didn't seem to remember what happened to Margaret, and why Bunny went from being pro-Victory, and alienating her best friend because of it, to suddenly telling her that she's in a simulation and disclosing the route to escape.
26.What was the red plane that both Alice and Margaret saw?
Was it a hallucination? Was there really a plane, and if so why, wouldn't the men have been more discreet? Was it symbolism for the red lights flashing across real-life Alice's eyes, as she's becoming more aware of the truth of Victory and her real-life surroundings?
There's also a theory that it was Margaret trying to get a message to the women of Victory before she got her memory wiped, and using her son's red toy plane as a symbol, because it was found in the desert near HQ before Margaret was caught.
The film, however, doesn't tell us what the plane was all about, so we're left to wonder, and wonder we shall!
27.Bunny says that "if the men die in Victory, they die in real life." Was this just a weird turn of phrase, or do the women not die in real life if they die in Victory?
Most importantly: Is Margaret actually okay? WHAT HAPPENED TO MARGARET?!?
There's no doubt that there are definitely some patchy areas in Don't Worry Darling, whether through the writers' oversight as they spliced the original script with their own or simply not enough attention to detail, but overall, I did like the film (despite having about 6 million questions).
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
That said, these questions won't let me rest! Help a girl out by letting me know your takes in the comments, as I doubt we'll get answers from Hollywood anytime soon.
⬆️ ⬆️ me shrieking all these questions at you.
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