Alice and Jack are the perfect couple. There is agreement on this in the small community on the edge of the desert. However, there is little that residents of this suburban area disagree on. Life runs smoothly, the women take care of the household, tidy their luxury apartments and meet some neighbor for drinks by the pool. And the men wear slim-fitting suits and ties as they climb into their flashing Cadillacs for the morning commute to the wasteland. The women are not allowed to ask what this work consists of.
In her second feature film “Don’t Worry Darling”, director Olivia Wilde creates a world that makes use of the aesthetics of the late 1950s, but sets enough points of irritation to question from the start what is wrong in this suburban idyll. Details on hairstyles, clothes, furniture do not want to fit into the reproduction of that era, are sometimes too smooth, sometimes too short or too minimalist. The look already tells of a future that the women here know nothing about. But this perfect world is about to fall apart. Wilde takes this quite literally, because the very first morning that Alice is frying eggs and making coffee for Jack for breakfast (a routine whose monotony we get conveyed to us in faster and faster cuts as the film progresses), an earthquake shakes the house. Alice is holding condiments, Jack the dishes, the gestures are well-rehearsed, it’s apparently not the first time this has happened. Alice suspects experiments at the research facility in the desert beyond where Jack works. He doesn’t answer her questions, withdraws from the affair with a smile and swings into his car.
Jack is played by singer Harry Styles, who cuts a handsome figure in perfectly fitting suits like Frank Sinatra does in his film roles. Unfortunately, Styles’ ingenuity doesn’t extend beyond three identical facial expressions. Luckily, the script gives him a scene where he can dance. The difference in talent and ability is perhaps so striking because Styles’ character is almost a supporting character alongside Florence Pugh. The film’s focus remains solely on Alice, who she plays.
Pugh made her international breakthrough in the horror film Midsommar (2019), in which American vacationers in Sweden fall into the clutches of a bloody cult. Her role here is similar, again playing the young woman who slowly finds out what’s going on and no one wants to listen. In Wilde’s film, the level of difficulty for the actress increases even more, as there is hardly a shot in “Don’t Worry Darling” in which Pugh cannot be seen. It might be boring for less talented actors, but Pugh keeps you watching every second as the story comes to a head and the ripple on the smooth surface of her perfect life is reflected in her acting. Slowly she changes from the naïve smile to irritated looks, which finally give way to a fighting spirit that one should better not stand in the way of.
Wilde stages Alice’s search for the truth as a psychohorror that announces itself on the audio level before the young woman begins to see things that everyone wants her to believe do not exist. It squeaks and cracks when memories break through as surreal dream-like sequences: drops of blood, dancers adorned with feathers, Alice fully clothed under water. These images are initially faded in so briefly that the unconscious senses them more than sees them.
Wilde wants to put her viewers in a similarly irritated state as her main character, making it understandable how powerless it feels when the young woman is only accused of being hysterical and should pull herself together instead of understanding. So “Don’t Worry Darling” becomes an oppressive commentary on the state of women’s rights in America. When Alice begins to break out of the 1950s idyll and demands control over her own life and body, one cannot help but read this as a reference to the current abortion debate in the USA. Amid all the political innuendos, the story’s resolution remains a bit weak, as if the screenwriters, Katie Silberman and brothers Carey and Shane van Dyke, had run out of ideas. The director and the leading actress make up for it.
