Don’t Worry Darling Review: Florence Pugh’s Performance Carries the Film

This review of Don’t Worry Darling has been published to coincide with the film’s Indian release on September 30, 2022.

Nowadays with films, it has become more about what could have been than what we really get to see. And that is exactly what I feel about Olivia Wilde’s psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling, which is about a young wife Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) who is married to Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) in a 1950s company town.

The film begins by introducing us to the cast of characters – the Chambers who like to party and have fun while having no kids. It’s a perpetual honeymoon phase with them. Then, we have Alice’s best friend Bunny (Wilde) who is married to Bill (Nick Kroll) with two kids; Peg (Kate Berlant) and Peter (Asif Ali) who are expecting their first child. It is quickly established that Jack is a workaholic and Alice stays at home as a devoted housewife, doing all the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the house. She sees him off to work, just like every other woman in the neighbourhood of Victory town. All the husbands leave together in their cars to Victory Headquarters where they work on this vague, secret project of developing progressive materials.

We don’t know what that is, nor do their wives as they are discouraged from asking questions about work. All they must do is cook and clean and serve their hardworking husbands when they come back home. Furthermore, they are also told not to venture out to the Headquarters which is situated on top of a hill in the surrounding desert.

It is already clear that something is amiss, and that feeling grows further when Margaret Watkins (KiKi Layne) is the only person standing out from this near-utopia. She acts strangely, saying things like everyone in the town is being lied to and there is some big secret behind this whole place. She is quickly brushed aside as mentally ill by the charismatic showrunner Frank (Chris Pine), who is the man behind the Victory Project and his wife Shelley (Gemma Chan), who is equally higher in the social hierarchy.

However, things go awry when Alice, while alone on the town’s bus, sees a biplane crash out in the desert. She goes towards the crash site to help, and inadvertently finds herself at the Headquarters. What she finds here is something that no wife was supposed to see, and things take a turn for the worse as she experiences strange occurrences in the form of delusions and feelings of paranoia, akin to what Margaret felt.

The film is all high on the visuals, but quite the opposite on the script. This is somewhat remedied by Pugh’s amazing acting. It is hard to not like any scene she is in. The weak script of the film does Pine’s performance as the antagonist. Styles is just “there” for most of the film, completely unimpressive despite being the draw. The rest of the characters, including Wilde’s also easily fade away in the background.

Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t take enough time to explain all the occurrences taking place with Alice. It becomes instantly predictable, as we see a pattern of Alice asking the questions and getting answers to them. It is clear that the ideas are not fully thought through and lack a sound basis; this becomes even more evident in the execution when the twist of the film arrives. Instead of being shocking as it was intended because not enough time is spent on fleshing it out. However, I would like to add that the score of the film is used in creative ways to convey feelings of dread and paranoia that Alice is feeling.

After a fantastic directorial debut with 2019’s Booksmart, Wilde has missed the mark with Don’t Worry Darling as she suffers from second film syndrome. The film is very aggressive with what it wants to convey. The central idea of it is that women should have the freedom to choose to work outside. It tries to be deep, but it just doesn’t work as everything is too on the nose. There is nothing to read beyond the surface, even though it tries hard to push the idea that there is some insightful social commentary in it. We have seen many films and shows do a concept like this before and Don’t Worry Darling adds nothing substantial to it.