Don’t Worry Darling is a newly released film directed by Olivia Wilde. The film features multiple well-known celebrities such as Gemma Chan, Chris Pine, Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Nick Kroll, Sydney Chandler and many more.
The film has allegedly had a whole load of drama on set and due to the constant gossip over the film’s behind the scenes, I decided it would be worth a watch to see if it was any good, even if the tensions on set were apparently high.
The film focuses on Jack and Alice, a couple in the 1950s who live in what seems like a perfect community called Victory. Victory is an experimental company town where its male citizens work on a top-secret project.
While the men are away, the women get to enjoy the luxuries Victory has to offer. However, when Alice finds the cracks in the idealized world she lives in, it’s hard for her to not question what she’s even doing in Victory.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this film, but before I even get to the movie review, I have to comment on the advertising. To be honest, I think Olivia Wilde created a lot of the drama surrounding this film as a sort of free advertising, and for a lot of people including myself, that worked to get us hooked and wanting to see the final product.
However, the actual trailers for the film didn’t get anything across in my opinion. When I was walking into the theater having watched three of the trailers, I still felt like I was walking in blind not knowing what I was about to watch.
Starting off the movie review I would like to talk about the things I enjoyed. I believe the costuming and cinematography were beautiful, well thought out and stunning. I could watch Alice start to question everything and distance from Jack by just what she wore to say goodbye to him in the mornings. And I appreciate how she went back to what she wore at the beginning of the movie after she got shock therapy and “forgot” everything suspicious going on in Victory.
Unfortunately, the actual plot wasn’t as good as the cinematography. There were many plot holes and questionable actions. I have four main questions and plot holes I want to cover: Shelley stabbing Frank, the plane, the virtual reality reveal and the ending.
Shelley wasn’t set up in any way to stab Frank and because she did, it opens up more unanswered questions: Did Shelley know about the Victory Project the whole time? Was she aware that women were being kept there against their will?
I really wish they had thought that action through more in the script and gave Shelley more depth to make her stabbing Frank make any sense. They could’ve done so much with Shelley’s character and her position as Frank’s wife in Victory, but it looks like the writers mainly just focused on Alice.
The biggest thing that bothered me watching this movie was what happened with the plane? It crashed in the desert, Alice tried to find it and then we never heard about it again. It doesn’t seem like there’s ever really any planes in Victory, and if Frank added it to the simulation, he wouldn’t have made it crash in the desert. There’s literally no explanation for this in the movie and it’s just used as a reason for Alice to walk into the desert.
Seeing as the plane is literally in the movie poster, I don’t see why they wouldn’t explain this, it feels like they just forgot about it.
The film also revealed the whole virtual reality plot twist in the third act which is way too late. It should’ve just been revealed in the second act. By the time the third act rolls around, everyone in the audience already has an idea of what’s happening and how this reality Alice is in is in some way not real, so it doesn’t give the shock or wow factor the director was probably going for.
What they should’ve done instead was reveal it’s a virtual reality in the middle around the time Alice accidentally escapes Victory and try to flesh out more of what Alice and Jack’s relationship in the past before Victory looked like. We only ever get snippets of background knowledge and I don’t believe it was enough.
Another question I have with the plot is the ending. What happened to the other women that were in Victory? Did they stay there, or did they try to escape after Alice? I don’t know whether I love or hate that the movie ended with Alice exiting Victory. I feel like there could’ve been so much more to tell that happens after she leaves and even in the theater, I heard people around me say “What?” and “That’s it?”
The ending was very cinematic, but did I think it was the best ending they could’ve done for this movie? No, not at all.
Overall, Don’t Worry Darling is an aesthetically pleasing movie to watch. Although it has many unanswered questions, the look, feel and acting are surprisingly above my expectations (yes even Harry Styles as Jack wasn’t all that bad). Florence Pugh as Alice was stunning and an amazing casting choice. You can only really tell there’s tension in behind the scenes photos and videos released by the cast along with everything that happened at the Venice Film Festival.
I think that everyone should give this movie at least a watch to have their own opinions about it. Even though the plot wasn’t executed as well as it could, I know that I’ll definitely be watching it again when it goes to streaming services and I’ll be jamming to the soundtrack for the next few weeks.
Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash
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