2 hrs 2 mins, Amazon Prime

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Satisfying thriller asks some intriguing questions about gender dynamics.

Sometimes I dream about being a real reviewer; getting paid to sit in a front-row seat at a swanky opening night, taking in the latest West End extravaganza while sipping on free champagne. My reality is a little different – this weekend involved buying a £13.50 ticket to a student show and then missing it because I got back late from a hockey game in Essex. So this week I’m making do and digging into the archives, reviewing a film that’s a few years old but warrants plenty of discussion: Olivia Wilde’s 2022 feature Don’t Worry Darling. Though it isn’t the most newsy thing I could write about, there are a few advantages – for example, I won’t feel any guilt being liberal with spoilers so I can really get into the themes of the film. 

The picture-perfect neighbourhood of Victory offers an idyllic vision of 1950s America: the men spend their days working on a mysterious project out in the desert, while the wives gracefully enjoy more feminine pursuits like dancing, shopping and being a mother. Protagonist Alice (Florence Pugh) seems to enjoy this comfortable domesticity, wrapped up in her love for her (equally conventionally beautiful) husband Jack (Harry Styles). But beneath the town’s veneer of serenity, Alice starts to notice oddities that can’t be explained away – fellow housewife Margaret’s mental breakdown, a plane crash no-one seems to have seen. The men around Alice try to crush her curiosity, lying and medicating her to keep her a faithful part of the flock. But she persists, determined to believe her own eyes, and eventually discovers the true secret of Victory – including a crushing revelation about her beloved Jack. 

Wilde’s directorial debut was the brilliant Booksmart, a teen comedy that captures the tenderness of female friendship while keeping a wicked sense of humour. (Without telling on myself too much, I found its depiction of girlhood particularly resonant!) In Don’t Worry Darling Wilde further explores the female experience, but in a much more grown-up – and much darker – way. The twist of Don’t Worry Darling is that Victory is in fact a computer simulation – an alternate reality concocted by disaffected men, in which they can live out their fantasies of being wealthy, attractive and beloved by women. Their ‘wives’, bound and hypnotised in the real world, are trapped without even knowing it. Jack, so suave and admired in Victory – and such an attentive husband – is in reality an unemployed recluse who’s imprisoned his former girlfriend. 

There’s a long tradition of filmmakers using horror and thriller conventions to reflect on social mores – from Get Out back to the likes of Rosemary’s Baby or the granddaddy of them all, Frankenstein. It’s a blunt tool for the job (social trauma = physical pain isn’t a subtle metaphor) but it’s often effective, as it is here. I think Wilde does an excellent job of using the nightmarish prison that is Victory as an allegory for how some men would like to see women degraded and put in our place. After all, in a world of incels and revenge porn, where a creep who grabs women “by the pussy” can be elected POTUS (twice), is it such a stretch of the imagination that a downtrodden, perpetually online man would choose to keep his ex locked in his own fantasy?

What makes Don’t Worry Darling so interesting is that Wilde explores some uncomfortable truths: these kinds of men aren’t obvious monsters, but live among us, loving others and being loved in turn. At the end of the movie, when Alice is finally on the point of escape, she falters when she imagines Jack beside her begging: “Don’t leave me.” While the film certainly never attempts to excuse Jack for his controlling and manipulative behaviour, it does make clear that he truly loves Alice, and throughout most of the movie we’ve seen her love him back. Alice’s best friend Bunny (played by Wilde) is revealed to be aware she’s in a simulation, but complies with her own subjugation (and notably, that of her friends) to achieve her own idealised version of motherhood. It’s not that Wilde is blaming women for falling victim to the kind of manipulation the men at Victory deal out; it’s more that she is cleverly playing with the idea that within male-female relationships, gendered power dynamics might be more common, more normalised and perhaps even more idealised than it is comfortable for us to acknowledge. 

This film has a very considered aesthetic, for which credit should go not only to Wilde but to the set, location and costume designers who have created a brilliantly eerie, too-perfect vision of golden-era America. I also think Pugh and Styles are well-cast as the leads. Florence Pugh is brilliant in everything she does, and I’ve yet to see a film in which she didn’t nail the brief. Styles, though broadly fine, is less of a polished actor and the first act does make you wonder why Wilde didn’t opt for a thespian with a bit of a meatier history. But once we know Jack’s true backstory, the casting choice becomes more understandable – of course, any man who’s dreaming himself into an existence in which he’s the alpha male will make himself look like Harry Styles. 

I will say that for all the tone and tension Wilde effectively creates, the film does drag in the middle. Once it’s established that Alice’s reality is not what it seems, I think the film dwells too long in what is meant to be an atmospheric build-up of suspense but comes across as just a bit of unnecessary distance between plot points. But it ends with a bang, and there’s definitely enough to sink your teeth into when it really gets going. Perhaps a film can be forgiven for being a bit slow and thoughtful when it gives you so much to think about.