Don't Worry Darling: Gossip Aside, this Stepford Wives Offspring Stands Shakily On Its Own Merits
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
The invisible elephant in Olivia Wilde’s wry pastel-paranoid thriller Don’t Worry Darling has been trumpeting its way insistently through the movie’s release.
Star Florence Pugh refuses to promote it. Public Q&As have seen the filmmaker spend more time reacting to questions about her love life than the existential fear she laboured to generate onscreen.
Can a movie with this much tension behind the scenes succeed in shaking off its backstory in favour of its story?
Harry Styles and Florence Pugh in Don’t Worry Darling.
Well, let’s say there’s something to be said for low expectations. Actress-turned-director Wilde isn’t the first filmmaker to go down the things-aren’t-what-they-seem road. Everything from The Matrix to ‘60s TV’s The Prisoner to The Stepford Wives have wrung chills out of the notion that life-is-but-a-dream (Sh-Boom being one of the ‘50s classic pop songs appropriated for the film).
If it’s not original ground, Don’t Worry Darling is a visually arresting mash-up of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, with its plot about an idyllic artificial ‘50s with pampered suburban housewives religiously dedicated to their husbands and their cocktails, and hints of the decade’s dark side.
The Victory Project is a top-secret pseudo-Manhattan Project in the desert with its own planned community of high-end stores and food, the domain of the wives. Every morning gorgeous cars with fins leave the driveway in perfect unison as the wives wave. For the price of never asking questions, these women live an eternal spa life.
Central to the story is Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) and his wife, Alice (Pugh), an enthusiastically sexual couple who the neighbours complain are “still on their honeymoon.” Between mojitos, Alice and her friends bond over dance class and meal plans. They include Bunny (Wilde), the mysteriously troubled Margaret (KiKi Layne) and the Queen of the coffee klatch Shelley (Gemma Chan), whose husband Frank (Chris Pine) is the almost evangelical mastermind of the mysterious Victory project (all we know is it is designed for “the development of progressive materials”).
This ersatz ‘50s dream lifestyle is, of course, too good to be true. And Alice soon shares Margaret’s dread and follows in her ill-fated footsteps to the forbidden outskirts of town.
Wilde tells her story with some style, maybe overusing a motif where the dance class is seen from above in frighteningly pale black-and-white like a mashup of Busby Berkeley and Guy Maddin.
Whatever her off-screen troubles, Pugh is clearly too much the professional to let it affect her performance. Alice is unraveling the closer she gets to the secret (aided by the duplicitous company doctor who encourages her to believe she’s losing her mind), and she delivers her descent into discovery/madness convincingly.
Styles is less of a presence, though he gets a manic nightclub dance scene that will make his fans swoon. And Pine plays Frank with a sinister messianic zeal that merited more screen time.
Bringing home the big “reveal” is where Wilde loses control of the narrative. The last act is ambiguous though we do get the basics, and the ending is open to discussion. What’s clear is that Don’t Worry Darling, in the back of its mind, is a warning about the reactionary notion that things used to be great, and the ‘50s were the apotheosis of that greatness. So much so that there are people who’d go back there if they could.
Again, it’s not a new idea. But whatever car crash you expected Don’t Worry Darling to be, it stands, however shakily, on its own merits.
Don’t Worry Darling. Directed by Olivia Wilde. Starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles and Chris Pine. Opens in theatres, September 23.