USA. 2022.
Crew
Director – Olivia Wilde, Screenplay – Katie Silberman, Story – Katie Silberman, Carey Van Dyke & Shane Van Dyke, Producers – Roy Lee, Katie Silberman, Olivia Wilde & Miri Yoon, Photography – Matthew Libatique, Music – John Powell, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dan Schrecker, Production Design – Katie Byron. Production Company – Vertigo Entertainment.
Cast
Florence Pugh (Alice Warren Chambers), Harry Styles (Jack Chambers), Chris Pine (Frank), Olivia Wilde (Bunny), Gemma Chan (Shelley), Kiki Layne (Margaret Watkins), Kate Berlant (Peg), Timothy Simons (Dr Collins), Nick Kroll (Dean), Sydney Chandler (Violet Johnson), Asif Ali (Peter), Douglas Smith (Bill Johnson), Steve Berg (Trolley Bus Driver), Ari’el Stachel (Ted Watkins)
Plot
Alice lives in the idyllic 1950s world of Victory Town with her husband Jack Chambers, where they are told they can never go beyond the edge of the town into the desert. Jack and the other men work at the Victory Project headed by Frank, although its purposes are secretive. One neighbour Margaret is brought back after going into the desert and becomes unbalanced. Alice is troubled by this and experiences random flashes of different memories. As Alice watches, she sees Margaret slit her throat but afterwards everybody denies this is what happened and insists Margaret is recovering in hospital. Alice becomes determined to penetrate the secret nature of The Victory Project and the truth about their existence in the community.
I first discovered Olivia Wilde as an actress on tv’s House M.D. (2004-12). She has since then branched out into film roles in everything from Tron Legacy (2010) and Cowboys & Aliens (2011) to the canceled-before-its-time tv series Vinyl (2016) and DC League of Super Pets (2022). She began directing with assorted music videos and made her feature-length debut prior to this with the non-genre comedy Booksmart (2019).
Don’t Worry Darling seemed beset by problems. Prior to shooting, Olivia Wilde had announced her ‘no assholes’ policy here she would get rid of anyone causing problems on set. This indeed came about when Shia LaBeouf, who was initially cast as the male lead, was reportedly fired by Wilde soon into shooting for what Wilde stated was a combative and difficult attitude on set, and musician Harry Styles stepped in to take over the role. LaBeouf responded by releasing video conversations that seemed to indicate otherwise. There were also reported on-set clashes between Wilde and Florence Pugh. Furthermore, Wilde ended up having an affair with Harry Styles on set and then had the public humiliation of being served with child custody papers from partner Jason Sudiekis on stage at the film’s premiere.
Don’t Worry Darling was most compared to The Stepford Wives (1975) with its sinister community where men are turning their housewives into perfectly servile android replacements. A more modern antecedent, undeniably influenced by The Stepford Wives, was Get Out (2017), although this drew everything out across racial lines. I was also reminded of the Canadian-made Bang Bang Baby (2014), which similarly opens inside a dreamily idyllic 1950s rock‘n’roll setting before the central woman character undergoes a Conceptual Breakthrough about the true nature of the world.
The film is not uninteresting. Olivia Wilde does fairly well with the presentation of the hyper-realised 1950s world around Florence Pugh. Pugh gives a good performance in the part. My only issue with Pugh is that she seems quieter, someone who stands at a distance from the rest of the happy Stepford Wives around her right from the outset.
Musician Harry Styles plays the husband with an undeniable handsome charisma. The film is incorrectly being reported as Styles’ acting debut but he had previously appeared in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017). Styles attracted some criticism for his (lack of) acting but I didn’t have many issues with it. He certainly holds attention with a highly enervated dance sequence in mid film. The one who gives a far worse performance in my opinion is Gemma Chan who remains sour-faced and blank, entirely failing to justify the attention that has been placed on her in recent years. On the other hand, Chris Pine really takes the opportunity to play a bad guy with a dark charisma. The scenes with he and Florence Pugh facing it off over a dinner table are some of the best in the film.
This does bring us to the film’s big twist where it decisively enters into genre territory. However, these scenes also present the biggest plausibility problems with the film. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here we learn that The Victory Project is a secretive organisation that has set up a community in Virtual Reality where men can imprison their partners inside a shared simulation of an idyllic 1950s world.
Olivia gets irate about this situation. Clearly she is making an allegory for the Red Pill movement and the desire for men to return to an idyllic 1950s America where a woman’s role was to stay in the kitchen, doing housework, making dinner and patiently waiting with the drink when the husband returns home at the end of the day. By contrast, the Harry Styles of the outside world is shown as long-haired and bespectacled in contrast to his smoothly handsome virtual self, the archetype of the nerd, if not incel, while scouring shady internet sites and with a James Bond poster prominently places on the wall of the apartment.
I had a number of issues with the plausibility of the Virtual Reality scenario. Florence Pugh is imprisoned on a bed – actually bound there – and kept permanently a prisoner inside the simulation without any apparent occasion where she exits from it. Ummm what about the need to eat and go bathroom at a minimum, not to mention get some movement in her muscles, move to prevent bedsores or even bathe? There surely must be some occasion among these where she would have to exit the simulation to tend to these needs. Even if she imprisoned there and fed by tube etc, it surely seems irresponsible for Harry Styles to have to exit the apartment and go off to lead a standard working day and leave her unattended. The system also seems to have the magic ability to rewrite her memories and cause her to become a new personality in the simulation.
There are also pieces that do not make sense for a virtual simulation. A virtual world is one where the entire environment is programmed. We see this played out with a certain logical sense – the group being told they cannot go out into the desert would indicate that that is the limit of the simulation. Therefore, why exactly would a plane be seen crashing in this world? The only reason it would be there is because it has been programmed in and is meant to be there. There also seem aspects that are just there to drive drama – like the need for the men to all have to go to work and pay for the system while the wives live in an idyllic world house-cleaning. If you would ask guys what their ideal realm to live in would be, I don’t think this would be it.
The idea of people being killed in the outside world after dying inside the simulation also seems nonsensical. It makes about as much sense as saying when your character in a videogame is killed off then the player will be in the real world as well. (What would have made more sense and been more eerie would have been characters like Margaret to make a return after appearing to have been killed – it would just be someone rebooting her player character). Also the idea of having to have a climactic car chase to stop Florence getting to the doorway in the desert makes no sense. In a virtual world, everyday physics has no meaning so vehicles skidding and crashing into one another would be no more than pixels meeting or have no effect unless someone had done a heck of a lot of very detailed programming.
The film comes with a series of interesting names attached, including Roy Lee and his Vertigo Entertainment production company who have been behind the spate of Asian films bought up and remade for English-language release with the likes of Dark Water (2005), The Departed (2006), The Lake House (2006), The Eye (2008), The Uninvited (2009), Oldboy (2013) and Death Note (2017), among others. Also present as executive producer is Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight (2008) and Red Riding Hood (2011).
The most interesting name is that of Shane Van Dyke, known as writer of several films for The Asylum with The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), Street Racer (2008), Transmorphers: Fall of Man (2009) and Battledogs (2013) and having directed several films for them with Paranormal Entity (2009), 6 Guns (2010), Titanic II (2010) and A Haunting in Salem (2011), as well as scripts for other companies with the likes of Chernobyl Diaries (2012), The Sacred (2012) and The Silence (2019).
(Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Chris Pine) at this site’s Best of 2022 Awards).
Trailer here