Movie Review: 'Don't Worry Darling' is Nearly Great

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

Directed by Olivia Wilde

Written by Katie Silberman

Starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, Nick Kroll

Release Date September 23rd, 2022

Published September 23rd, 2022

If your life was perfect, how would you know? I’m not talking about the basic signifiers of things you would have that would make your life seem perfect like money, a nice house, a supportive family, I mean, what if life was perfect. No pain, no sorry, no irritation or even annoyance. Your every need is met immediately. Nothing is ever out of place. It’s an impossible standard, of course, but what if? If life were perfect, how would you know?

This is a philosophical thought experiment. If life were perfect, perfect would be normal and thus not perfect. How do you know there is up without down? How do you know what joy is if you don’t know what the opposite of joy feels like? Yin and Yang, give life meaning. Love and the absence of love are distinct feelings. If you only ever knew love then love would become a mundane expectation of everyday life, unrecognizable without knowing the absence of it. What is loss if you never lose?

The new movie Don’t Worry Darling got me thinking about this idea of a perfect life and how impossible that idea is. This notion that someone could invent a perfect life is downright silly but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Mad men like Chris Pine’s Frank seek to stamp out all problems from the world, tame life into what they want it to be. He’s admired for this madness and seeks to indoctrinate others to his notion of what a perfect life would look like.

He’s arrogant enough to push aside the notion that the human mind is not built for perfection. In the brilliant action adventure movie, The Matrix, a character known as Agent Smith, wonderfully played by Hugo Weaving, explains that the A.I monsters who created The Matrix, a simulated reality intended to enslave humans while the humans themselves are treated as organic batteries, first created a perfect simulation.

The first Matrix created a simulated reality with no heartache, no pain, no death, no war, no negatives whatsoever. Everyone was cared for and their needs were perfectly attended to. The humans went insane in no time at all. The mind rebelled against perfection because how would you know that life is perfect if every day featured the same level of precise perfection? If perfect becomes normal, normal becomes mundane and the imagination seeks something to think about, something to question.

Don’t Worry Darling tantalizes us with these philosophical ideas but the movie has more on its mind, something, well, more mundane and unfocused. The film centers on Alice, played by Florence Pugh. Alice begins to see that the perfect Eisenhower era rows of homes and the endlessly perfect routine of sending her husband, Jack (Harry Styles), to work with a kiss and welcoming him home with a cocktail and a four course dinner every night is too perfect in the sense of its clockwork ideal.

Every day is the same perfect routine. Alice gets everything she wants when she wants it. Her husband makes love like a champion, including amazing oral sex without complaint or the need for reciprocation. Her every need has been met and so her mind begins to wander. As it does, the cracks begin to show and the simulation begins to break down. The more that Alice questions her reality, by questioning the man who runs the town, Chris Pine’s Frank, the more she sees through what is happening to her.

Sadly, Don’t Worry Darling is far too murky and muddled to really drill down on this idea of perfection. The perfect world scenario is used as a hanger for a plot that includes touches on toxic masculinity, feminism, in-cel culture, and a lot great looking cinematography in scenes that don’t really add up to much in the whole of the story. Director Olivia Wilde has a wonderful eye and with screenwriter Katie Silberman, they have a lot of ideas but they don’t appear to settle on any one idea by the end.

The movie tends to start and stop to do lavish set pieces that show off this perfect society and the cracks growing that only Alice can see but this happens perhaps one too many times. The nearly 2 and a half hour run time employed to corral all of these ideas unfortunately allows the film to run slack while it sets up for another set piece and another and so on. Then, a movie about a simulated reality builds up to a car chase and a foot chase, the least inventive notions possible for a movie with lofty philosophical notions.

I cannot and will not dismiss Don’t Worry Darling. The film is gorgeous and elements of it work incredibly well. I love the look of the movie, I like the dream-like aspects of the movie but I wanted a stronger sense of the ideas behind the movie. Olivia Wilde has spoken in interviews about basing the character of Chris Pine on Jordan Peterson but if that’s the case I didn’t find that in the movie. Where Jordan Peterson is a spineless grifter hopping on conservative trends in order to mine a financial niche, Pine’s character Frank is handsome, charismatic, dangerous and fully believes the nonsense he’s peddling. It's a good idea to send up Peterson's faulty ideas about gender roles, but the execution of the send up doesn't have enough teeth.

Frustratingly, Don’t Worry Darling keeps piling on elements that fail to add anything or actively invite questions that the film has no intention of answering. An early instance of the simulated reality breaking down finds Alice on a trolley that travels a ways into the desert for unspecified reasons. While there, Alice sees what she believes to be a plane crash. After failing to get the driver to help investigate, Alice goes to offer help alone. Not finding the plane crash, she finds the Victory Project HQ. She touches something and wakes up back in her bed in her perfect home.

The plane crash is a vague reference to the now missing or dead child of another character, Margaret, played by Kiki Layne. While everyone has been programmed to forget the child, Margaret is cracking through the reality of the simulation. She’s having memories of her son that she is not supposed to have and through her memories, specifically a toy plane belonging to the child, Margaret is indirectly cracking Alice’s reality, causing her to remember things that happened outside of this perfection.

However, this idea gets underlined and replayed more than once and as Alice’s reality begins to crack, we get that point underlined perhaps once too many times and so the movie demonstrates at times where it could have been tightened up in editing. For example, three scenes linger too long on Alice beginning to lose her mind. The first has her washing her floor to ceiling window. Slowly, the window pushes her backwards as she stares at what she thinks is a stain she can’t wipe away. Eventually, she’s pushed back against a wall and nearly crushed before she snaps back to her virtual reality.

Another instance has Alice making eggs and imagining the eggs to be empty. She cracks the empty shells in her hands over and over as if she had discovered a glitch in the Matrix, so to speak. Then everything is fine, there are no broken eggs and life is as it should be. The final instance finds Alice attempting to harm herself. While putting away lunch meat using plates and plastic wrap, Alice decides to wrap her own head in plastic wrap. It’s a terrific visual and would be shocking if it had not been in the film’s trailer. It also doesn’t have a great payoff with Alice simply tearing the plastic wrap off.

I’ve seen another reviewer wonder if this was somehow the simulation, operated by Frank, doing these things to Alice in order to push Alice around. That’s a good read as the film seems to justify this in dialogue later when Frank gets Alice alone and talks about wanting a worthy adversary to overcome in his quest for domination. The dialogue rings hollow however because it, quite obviously sounds like the movie trying to justify the choices made and not resoundingly give these choices a more believable or grounded sensibility.

What bugs me about Don’t Worry Darling is that there are so many interesting ideas here. So many worthy topics of discussion, deconstruction and reasonable derision. Those ideas unfortunately are fighting for air while the movie goes about languishing in this lavish, perfect world, appearing eager to show us the period detail with little subversion. The cinematography, costumes and sets are flawless and the cast is first rate. It’s just a shame that the story is too scattershot to make one specific point about any of the big ideas.

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