Diary of a Mad Housewife
Lightning didn’t strike director Olivia Wilde twice, but at least we have Venice drama to enjoy with ‘Don’t Worry Darling’.
Don’t Worry Darling
Director: Olivia Wilde • Writer: Katie Silberman
Starring: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Gemma Chan, Chris Pine, KiKi Layne, Nick Kroll, Sydney Chandler, Kate Berlant, Asif Ali, Douglas Smith
USA • 2hrs 3mins
Opens Hong Kong September 22 • IIB
Grade: C
I have questions. So many questions.
None of which can truly be asked here for fear of giving away too much of the story in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, an up-its-own-arse thriller about the eternal struggle for equality between men and women, power, entitlement and, I guess, love. But suffice to say, there are a lot of threads that go untied, ideas left unexplored from new perspectives, and logic that leaps right into a yawning chasm of WTFery, all wrapped in impeccable Mid-century Modern trappings that distract from the fact there’s no there there. At the core is a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode, or maybe Black Mirror (for the kids), maybe a short story from any number of Stephen King collections. It’s got flashes of 1975’s The Stepford Wives, and 2019’s nutty Serenity, and cribs directly from Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The point is, we’ve seen Don’t Worry Darling before, and if screenwriter Katie Silberman and partner in crime Wilde, re-teaming after 2019’s low-key hit Booksmart, think they’re breaking ground both of them need to take a seat.
If we’re being totally honest, the well documented DRAMA roiling around Don’t Worry Darling – Wilde and star co-star Harry Styles’ on-set trysts, the verklempt leading lady armed with Aperol spritz, spitgate, promotional boycotts, Shia LaBeouf as an aggrieved party – smacks of the kind of misogyny Wilde and Silberman are purportedly railing at here. Plenty of male directors have taken up with their younger female stars and we got crickets. But there’s nothing media likes more than perceived cattiness between women, so as soon as star Florence Pugh demonstrated some displeasure with the pair, shit got real. Everyone’s going to want to see why Pugh’s so hot under the collar, so the juicy press will help box office performance. Judging from the results Pugh’s pissed for reasons unrelated to Wilde’s sex life.
Clearly the ’50s weren’t that bad
Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, a perfect 1950s housewife whose husband Jack (Styles) has a plum job with the secretive Victory Project but always has time for some o’ dat sweet watermelon sugar, if you know what I mean. Next door to their perfect suburban house is Alice’s BFF Bunny (Wilde) and her husband (Nick Kroll) and kids. Other neighbours include the “always pregnant” Peg (Kate Berlant), newcomers Violet and John (Sydney Chandler and Douglas Smith), and the psychologically troubled Margaret (KiKi Layne). Everyone works for Victory, and everyone lives in this subdivision. The overlords of the entire thing are Frank and Shelley (Chris Pine and Gemma Chan), and when Alice becomes convinced a plane crashed in the desert, Margaret committed suicide and Frank is hiding something, her world as she knows it starts to unravel. This unravelling happens shortly after Jack is very publicly promoted and leads a corporate cheer of “This is our world!”
This shit’s so on the nose it’s not even funny.
It’s hard to determine exactly where Don’t Worry Darling went off the rails. Is Wilde out of her comfort zone with lightly scifi allegory, paranoid gaslighting or action (use your mirrors!)? Or is it the rom-com-leaning Silberman (Rebel Wilson starrer Isn’t It Romantic) who’s bit off more than she can chew? The gut says the problems are baked into the script: it should not have taken 90 repetitive minutes for the action to start. Repetition is not a motif that works here. And the film isn’t technically troubling; Wilde’s got an ace crew backing her up. DOP Matthew Libatique’s (Iron Man, mother!) idealised sunniness is economical in encapsulating the perfect walls closing in on Alice, tight frames mirroring her inability to see the big picture. Production designer Katie Byron (Color out of Space, Zola) is working with a hoary visual convention but still makes every frame sparkle, and costume designer Arianne Phillips (Nocturnal Animals, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) has made Pugh utterly luminous. Girl is rockin’ that bathrobe.
More Chan, please
Truth? He’s not that bad
But it’s all window dressing. Bottom line, Don’t Worry Darling (yeesh, that title. We get it, condescending, moving along) is a premium slab of a director believing their own press and having no one around them to say something like, oh, I don’t know: “That’s been done before.” or maybe “That’s not nearly as smart as you think it is.” Don’t Worry Darling’s flaws can’t be laid at the feet of the cast, which does more with the paper thin screenplay than most would be able to. Pugh has a relatively short filmography but she’s proven herself reliable, versatile and infinitely watchable, and despite Silberman’s habit of occasionally making Alice an outright idiot, she does frantic, terrified, angry wonders here. Pine, The Best Chris, rarely puts a foot wrong when he opts to dive headlong into off-beat parts (he is going to crush Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), and his cult leader adjacent manipulation is quite chilling. And Chan’s steely imperiousness makes you wonder what a sequel with her in charge would look like. That’s your movie right there. And no. Styles was fine. He’s the least of Darling’s problems. — DEK