Don't Worry Darling

Alice and Jack live a perfect little life in the perfect little community of Victory, an experimental company town for a group of men who work on a top-secret project. Life at the Victory Project is a Mid-Century Modern Disneyland dream of the American World of Tomorrow. It’s clean and uncluttered, oh so modern, and also isolated in the middle of a vast desert. It’s a nice little place of nice little homes and nice little lawns, boozey dinner parties, bright and shiny classic cars, and vacantly smiling wives who stand on their verdant lawns each morning to wave goodbye, as their husbands head off to work and bring home the bacon, so that the wives can later fry it up in a pan, and all to a near constant doo-wop soundtrack.

There’s just one rule…

Don’t venture outside of town, and don’t ask about your husband’s work.

…Okay, there’s two rules.

And much like in the movie Midsommar, Florence Pugh is the one person who notices that there’s some weird shit going on, which becomes a problem for her. Sure, she has an idyllic existence… a morning of light chores, then a dance class, then maybe some shopping with her fellow gossipy housewives, or perhaps a three martini lounge poolside at the club, and then back home in time for her handsome husband to arrive from a long day at work, who then immediately goes down on her on the kitchen table, and all before the lovely roast she’s prepared for the night’s dinner.

Idyllic.

But still… shit is fucked up, yo.

Alice can’t quite put her finger on why or how. It bugs her, lurks just outside of her line of sight, teasing. She picks, and pokes, and prods, and as reality begins to unravel, she starts to fracture, and even though everyone just says that she’s crazy, advising her to just smile, and to maybe have another martini, assuring her that everything is fine… the question nags at her. What is this place? How did I get here? Who am I?

Simply put, Don’t Worry Darling is about the tyranny of the patriarchy, disguised as domestic bliss, presented in a “Stepford Wives” meets “Mad Men” setting.

The answer to what’s really going on here mostly works, even if it’s a bit too on-the-nose. I can’t really get into it here without spoiling the whole thing, but I will say that there’s basically two guesses as to what’s really happening here that are pretty obvious from the start. Personally, I was hoping for my other guess, not what it actually turned out to be, and admittedly, now that I’ve seen it, I kinda wish even more that I had been right, but either way, it’s still a good time.

Don’t Worry Darling isn’t groundbreaking, or even all that new of an idea, but it’s still pretty well-done, mostly. The script falls a little short, stumbling here and there, but it definitely looks good, and Florence Pugh is great as always.

Having finally seen the film, I think most of the more adamant thumbs downs you might have heard or read really stem more from the veritable typhoon of behind-the-scenes drama that swirled around this film’s set, rather than as a result of the actual film, but your mileage may vary.

I enjoyed it.