As the summer blockbuster season was finishing its final stretch, the film world had Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to her well-received directorial debut, 2019’s Booksmart, at or on top of their fall 2022 most anticipated films lists. Don’t Worry Darling, the story of a 1950s housewife who begins to have suspicions about the suburban life she shares with her husband in the company town of Victory, California, was that follow-up. With a world premiere set at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, it should have been smooth sailing into Oscar bait season.
And then came that final week in August, which brought us this. And then came this, along with the receipts to back it up. And finally, the first domino to fall in what would become one of the most disastrous press runs in recent Venice Film Festival history and of 2022.
The off-screen drama may have put it on the radar of casual observers, but is the on-screen product Don’t Worry Darling serves worthy of movie lovers’ attention? As my favorite solo song title from the late great Guru of Gang Starr states, keep your worries.
Don’t Worry Darling is rotten from its core, and that core is the fact it “borrows” a bit too much from other films. The script, written by Wilde’s Booksmart collaborator Katie Silberman, is Get Out for homemakers, replacing the closeted racist family who would have voted for Obama three times if they could with adoring husbands. There’s also a lot of The Stepford Wives with the 50s suburban setting and the film’s emphasis on perfection and conformity.
The attempt to meld the two films into one isn’t a crime because Wilde and Silberman did the same for Booksmart, leaning heavily on Superbad and other teen comedies. Still, this effort lacks the nuance they applied to the former to differentiate it from the latter or any film with a similar plot (Pleasantville!), which makes it challenging to know when the influences end and Don’t Worry Darling begins.
It’s Vanilla Ice explaining the difference between “Ice Ice Baby” and the Mercury-Bowie duet, “Under Pressure,” on film. The “ting” that might make it a little different? Some pieces of The Truman Show that make the film as predictable as the lawsuit settlement Mr. Ice had to fork over and a random, unintentionally comedic tap dance scene that perfectly embodies Wilde's mess.
If the redundant storyline isn’t enough of a turn-off, the tone happily steps up to hurt the film further. Don’t Worry Darling broaches the issue of how toxic masculinity via the belief that a woman’s place is solely in the home strangles the life out of women and feminism. The underlying message seems to be home economics is an evil akin to a form of slavery.
However, we’ve reached a point where the homemaker is more respected and their contributions valued on par with women in the workforce. Making a film that treats the occupation as a prison is counterproductive to the goals and progress feminism seeks to attain. It’s as antiquated as the toxic belief that women should only be homemakers.
Don’t Worry Darling does have two saving graces - Florence Pugh and visuals. Pugh is a force despite the script’s failings, and her ability to hit the right emotional cues when triggered makes the predictability easier to bear. The only thing that kept Pugh’s performance from being more compelling was a mismatched pairing with Harry Styles, whose inability to go beyond one note when sharing scenes with her proved Shia LaBeouf was the better choice for that role.
The visual elements of Don’t Worry Darling, such as the costume and set designs, are top-tier and may warrant awards consideration. There are also a few glimpses of impressive cinematography here and there. The standout shots include aerial shots of moving vehicles and a magnificent window cleaning scene. That’s where the high marks stop for the film.
It would be unfair to judge Don’t Worry, Darling based on what happened off-camera. On the other hand, critiquing it based on those unfortunate events would give at least one excuse for the film not reaching its potential.
Given what Wilde did with Booksmart and having Pugh in the cast, Don’t Worry Darling had everything it needed to rise above the drama that preceded it. Instead, it ended up being more of a mess on-screen than it ever was off it.
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