The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
Based on the trailers, I expected Don’t Worry Darling to be a straightforward ripoff of The Stepford Wives. I was wrong. It is a ripoff of The Stepford Wives, but it also rips off elements from several other films to keep you on your toes. Despite some strong performances and production values, there is not an original bone in this movie’s body, leaving the film as a generic, forgettable thriller that doesn’t do a single thing that hasn’t been done better in other movies.
Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as Alice and Jack Chambers, a young couple that live in a small town that seems to be stuck in 1950s style Americana. The men all go to work at the same plant every morning, the women stay home to cook and clean, everybody drinks and smokes constantly, etc. Through a series of odd events, like the suicide of her friend and a mysterious plane crash, Alice begins to suspect that things aren’t quite as simple and nice as they seem. I’ll save the rest for the spoilers section of the review in a bit.
As for positives, the performances are generally great. Pugh is particularly strong, creating a character so sympathetic that you almost forget the weaknesses of the script. Almost. I feel like Florence Pugh is in a competition with Anya Taylor Joy for the young actress that I most want to like because of their appreciable talent, but I keep wishing that they would pick better projects. Chris Pine is also great as the founder of this town, projecting a sense of suave and vague menace. He’s the kind of sleaze that one instantly recognizes as a threat without being able to pinpoint why, which requires a level of subtlety in Pine’s performance that is admirable and unnerving. As for Harry Styles, he’s fine. I honestly only have a vague notion of who he is (I know that he’s a pop singer because The Film Nurse’s teenaged niece is a fan), but he does a perfectly acceptable job considering that he is working with two actors (Pugh and Pine) that can clearly act circles around him.
The direction and production design are also solid. I mainly know Olivia Wilde as an actress, but she shows here that she is a capable director. If I hadn’t seen the films that this is copying, I likely would have found the film to be suspenseful and intriguing as long as I didn’t think about things too much. This is a weakness of the script, though, and I would like to see what Wilde can do with something less derivative. The 1950s aesthetic of the film is also topnotch, with great set design that feels like something that you would see in a sitcom of that era.
Without getting into spoilers yet, the plot broke down on several levels for me. First, the notion that the idealized retrospective view of the 1950s is a myth is one of the most tired commentaries in all of film. This is the sort of point that a college student would make with misplaced confidence that they just forward a deep thought. The film doesn’t do this trope many favors either, as the lifestyle in this movie seems pretty damn great. Before Alice starts picking things apart, everyone seems quite happy. As I told the Film Nurse as we left the theater, I’m not going to ask questions if we wake up one morning in the 1950s, own a big house and a Corvette and I can have a martini and cigarette in my office. Oh the horror.
Second, Alice’s investigation makes no sense. The film relies on her either 1. Being in exactly the right place at the right time for no reason; 2. Making vast leaps in logic that aren’t based on anything in particular and 3. Suddenly realizing that really strange things are, well, really strange. For example, she suddenly finds it odd that all of the couples in this town met in exactly the same way. That never seemed weird to her before? The suicide of her friend suddenly made it weird that all of her neighbors share the same exact backstory? As a mystery, the film utterly fails because the detective work makes little sense. Conclusions are either so obvious that they should have been made sooner (like years sooner) or are reached without any kind of internal logic.
Alright, SPOILER TIME…….the first half of the film does play out just like The Stepford Wives, but the resolution is completely different, while still being obnoxiously unoriginal. The town isn’t real, it’s a simulation that the men are putting their wives into (mostly) against their will in an attempt to provide them with a better life. Chris Pine’s character is the architect of this program and I will get into why none of this makes sense in a moment. Due to weaknesses in the script, I realized fairly early that the town isn’t real (why doesn’t anyone ever leave and why does all of their food and supplies come from within the town, I pondered to myself) and the second half transitions into being a full-blown knockoff of The Truman Show without any of that film’s ambition or heart. With this being a simulation, we also get multiple elements lifted straight from The Matrix, including a direct copy of the agents that is so brazen that I can’t imagine that the filmmakers didn’t realize that this is borderline plagiarism.
The twist also doesn’t make sense on several basic, logistical levels. It’s revealed that Jack is keeping Alice in essentially a technology-induced coma to keep this simulation going, but it’s in their apartment. How is she being kept alive? How is she using the bathroom? How is she eating? He goes off to work everyday to afford to keep her in this simulation, but then what is the business model of the simulation? He still has to pay for their apartment, so what money is Chris Pine’s character getting out of this? They also show in flashbacks that Alice and Jack live in a small, dingy one-bedroom apartment, but also that she is a surgeon. They couldn’t have picked literally any other profession to make their economic plight more believable? She’s not a waitress at Waffle House for fuck’s sake, just get a bigger apartment.
Don’t Worry Darling is a well-made film that thinks its far smarter than it actually is. It is also dependent on its target audience not having seen many other movies so that the twists seem fresh and innovative, while older audiences will likely see every twist and turn coming with a mild yawn. If you haven’t seen the other films that I mentioned in this review, then Don’t Worry Darling will probably be a more enjoyable experience. But, even then, I recommend just watching those movies instead.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_Worry_Darling#/media/File:Don’t_Worry_Darling_Poster_2.jpg
