JP Nunez
On paper, Don’t Worry Darling looks like an absolute can’t-miss thriller. It was directed by Olivia Wilde, whose debut film Booksmart was very well received, and it features an all-star cast that includes Wilde herself, Florence Pugh, Chris Pine, Harry Styles, and Gemma Chan. On top of that, the trailers were fantastic, so I was fully expecting this to be one of the best horror movies of the year. But after seeing it, I’m sad to say that it did not live up to my expectations.
Don’t Worry Darling is set in the 1950s, and it’s about a young couple named Jack and Alice who live a seemingly idyllic life in a small town called Victory. However, there is one thing about this place that seems a bit off. All the men there are employed by the same mysterious company, and their work is so top secret they can’t even tell their wives about it. Eventually, Alice becomes curious about just what is going on in this utopian town, and as she probes deeper into the mystery, her perfect life begins to fall apart.
When Don’t Worry Darling began, I was immediately struck by two things: the period setting and the acting. Let’s start with the setting. While I’m not old enough to say how authentic the film’s 1950s aesthetic really is, I can say that it seemed spot-on to me. Everything from the cars to the way the characters dress to the decor in their house looks like it would be totally at home in every movie and TV show I’ve seen from that era, so I bought into the period setting from the very first frame.
But as great as that aesthetic is, the acting in this movie is even better. The entire cast here is just as good as you’d expect, and given the names in this ensemble, that’s some high praise indeed. In particular, I have to give special mention to Florence Pugh. She plays the main character Alice, so she gets the most to do in this film, and she totally nails everything her character goes through. She runs the emotional gamut from happy-go-lucky to totally distraught and just about everything in between, and I completely believed every second of her performance.
But when Don’t Worry Darling began to reveal a few tiny cracks in Alice and Jack’s idyllic life, I didn’t quite buy it. It felt like the movie introduced the mystery a bit too early, so it didn’t fit into the narrative as smoothly as it should’ve. Instead, I think the film should’ve spent a bit more time building up the characters and the setting before showing us that things aren’t quite as perfect as they seem, and that would’ve made the cracks in this apparent utopia feel much more ominous.
Most notably, there’s a scene involving some eggs that looked like a great WTF moment in the trailers, but when I saw it in the movie, it fell totally flat. It just didn’t make any sense to me in context, so it felt more like a random anomaly than a clue to a larger problem. If it had come later in the film, it probably would’ve been much more impactful, but its actual placement in the story saps it of almost all its weight.
Thankfully though, that stops being a problem soon enough. At about the 30 or 40-minute mark, something happens that kicks off the mystery in earnest, and it made me really scratch my head and wonder just what the hell could be going on in this place. It’s super intriguing, so it completely makes up for the slight missteps Don’t Worry Darling makes before that.
Then, as the story progresses, Alice’s psyche begins to deteriorate, and this just might be my favorite thing about the film. While it never goes full-on horror, some of the things Alice experiences are pretty freaky, and they land the movie firmly in the horror “extended family,” so to speak. These scenes do a great job of building the mystery and drawing you in, so as the movie went on, I was just loving it more and more.
But when the third act kicks in, something unexpected happens, and it ruins the entire film. I’m obviously not going to say what it is, but I will say that it’s basically the worst kind of M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist imaginable. It’s not the “it was all a dream” trope, but it’s not much better. To be fair, I’m sure there are some people who won’t mind it, and there are probably even a few who will actually like it, but for me, it basically nullified everything Don’t Worry Darling had gotten right up until that point.
And once that happened, I immediately stopped caring about the story, so even though the rest of the third act is still executed really well, it felt more like visual noise than anything substantial. In fact, it killed my interest so much that I just wanted the movie to end, and when the credits began to roll, I walked out of the theater as quickly as I could.
So at the end of the day, I’m really sad to say that Don’t Worry Darling is a huge disappointment. It started out with so much potential, and I was on board with it for so long, but the twist in the third act completely ruined the experience. Granted, I didn’t find it quite as disappointing as Barbarian (I know I’m in the minority on that, but I still stand by my opinion on that movie), but it was still bad enough that I’d definitely recommend giving this film a pass.
Don’t Worry Darling is playing in theaters right now.
