Don’t Worry Darling | Review

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Photo By Sammy Dunne

Don’t Worry Darling is displayed on a sign outside a theater at Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18 Theatre in St. Charles. Starring Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, the film gained a lot of attention online.

     Don’t Worry Darling, directed and produced by Olivia Wilde, stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles as Alice and Jack Chambers. The film, which quickly rose to popularity on social media platforms like TikTok, centers around families and couples living in an ideal suburban neighborhood that realize the town might not be as innocent as it seems. While this film is a great psychological thriller, it left me with a lot of questions.

     Don’t Worry Darling features Alice and Jack Chambers, a young couple living in the utopian town of Victory, California, in the 1950s. Victory is an experimental company town in which the male residents work for a top-secret corporation that provides housing for their families. While the men are out at work, the wives get to enjoy themselves completing their chores and living in paradise. No matter how perfect her life is, Alice begins to feel like something is off, almost as if she doesn’t belong there. Hallucinations and sinister daydreams fill Alice’s head, eventually making her question everything she knows.

     Although the movie may have some flaws, Wilde did a great job developing the characters and I was invested in the film through the ending credits. The life that Alice and Jack have together seemed perfect at first until things started to unravel. Every day was the same until tensions began to rise after Alice started getting hallucinations that included glimpses into her past life in black and white and scenarios of her killing herself without even realizing it.

     The movie felt slow in the beginning but managed to pick up the pace. Wilde did a great job constructing Alice’s complicated and exciting storyline, showing how she overcame her battles. Wilde also did a good job portraying a toxic relationship and how Alice struggled to weave her way through paranoia, confusion and pain. I felt like I was a part of Alice’s journey because I didn’t know anything about her in advance. Instead, I was learning things at the same time as Alice, which made me feel more invested in the plot.

A promotional poster for Don’t Worry Darling shows an airplane crashing to the ground above an unaware couple. Directed by American actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde, the film gained a lot of popularity on social media. (Photo by Sammy Dunne)

     Once the truth came out about the Victory Project, the mysterious program that the men in Victory work for, the movie began to have some missing pieces. Even though the film was meant to be a confusing and twisted thriller, there were still unanswered questions that stood out to me. In one particular scene, after Alice is done shopping for the day, she takes the trolley for a scenic ride home. She witnesses a plane crash in the distance and no one else is fazed by this accident except her. She tries to alert the others on the trolley, but everyone avoids eye contact and ignores her completely. She feels as if she is going crazy and is starting to see things that aren’t real again, but she is certain that the plane crash happened in real life. After all of the stops have been made by the trolley, Alice stays on so she can further investigate what happened. She ventures out to the area of the plane crash, breaking the neighborhood rules, but she doesn’t find anything. The screen then goes black. Throughout the rest of the film, the plane crash is never brought up again. I was unsure of whether the lack of mentioning the crash was intentional or if it was due to a lack of directing skills from Wilde. If that scene was explained in any way it would’ve made the movie even better, and I would have left the theater feeling satisfied rather than having numerous questions.

     Overall, Don’t Worry Darling was a good thriller. I feel that the film was highly ranked simply because of Harry Styles’ role in it, but the rest of the cast was great as well. Although there was a lot of drama on the internet surrounding the actors in the film before the movie even came out, they still put on excellent performances. After I left the theater, I found myself questioning many parts, but I was able to have post-movie conversations that were probably more interesting and exciting than the movie itself. While there are some plot holes and missing pieces, Don’t Worry Darling was a well-thought-out film that managed to keep me entertained and never made me think about when the film would end. I always wanted more and was shocked by the different turning points that occurred. I would recommend Don’t Worry Darling to anyone that likes psychological thrillers.