Don't Worry Darling

Olivia Wilde follows up her winning debut feature Booksmart with this stylish, ambitious, not entirely successful psychological thriller throwback to genre films (and sensibilities) of an earlier era. Florence Pugh plays a woman living in an idealized 1950s American company town called Victory, where her husband (Harry Styles) and the other men drive off to work in their shiny cars every morning leaving the wives to cook, clean, shop, gossip, drink, and raise their kids (if they choose to have them). But something is clearly not right about this idyllic neighborhood, and who the hell knows what the project the men are working on all day is, and what exactly are the motivations of Victory's charismatic leader Frank (Chris Pine)?

The film is reminiscent of '70s satirical psychological thrillers and horror films about marriage like The Stepford Wives and The Brood, but Wilde and screenwriter Katie Silberman (the final writer on Booksmart) don't do enough to update the themes of these genres for contemporary times and attitudes. I suppose that says something in itself—like the issues inherent to male/female relationships haven't changed at all in fifty years—but I think the intended point here is actually the opposite.

The seemingly greatest strength of the picture turns out to be its fatal flaw. Wilde and Silberman tell their story through the eyes of Pugh's protagonist. That's an understandable choice since she gives a knockout performance, but it prevents us from getting to know any of the other inhabitants of this town. Worse, it renders the ending far less powerful and effective than it should be. It's pretty clear from the get-go that there will be a big third-act reveal in this movie, but the execution of that climax requires shifting the film's perspective to another character, breaking the well-established point of view.

It's hard not to imagine how much more successful the film would have been if told in a more omniscient way, where we could have learned more about each inhabitant of this strange town. The single-protagonist approach presents its main character as if she's suffering a Repulsion-style mental breakdown. By showing us all the events through her eyes we're meant to empathize with her situation and ask, is she going crazy? Is she being gaslit? But unlike Repulsion, which takes place in everyday London, this story takes place in an already hyper-stylized unreality. We know something's up right from the start, so we never actually believe this housewife is going mad, and thus we're always ahead of her and ahead of the movie.

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