Director: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine
Year: 2022
Of all the problems surrounding Don’t Worry Darling, the biggest was the one we could have most easily predicted; Olivia Wilde is a bad director. Or maybe she’s just still an amateur and we can’t expect anything other than speed bumps for a while; Booksmart is her only other feature and it’s not nearly as good as some predetermining critics think it is. Its biggest flaw (and it’s the same here) is its reliance on “borrowing”, until it becomes not its own film but some sort of bastardization of others, a true knock-off copy, and Don’t Worry Darling is, sadly, just more of the same.
Alice & Jack lead a perfect life; they should, the lives of the men of the Victory project are designed to be perfect, to have every amenity waiting for them when they return from their work on a Top Secret project, one which they can’t even tell their perfect wives about, but one which is guaranteed to change the world. But Alice starts to suspect that not all in their tiny community in the desert is as it seems, and her questions get her the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people.
It’s not even that Don’t Worry Darling is bad, it’s that it’s badly directed. The story is interesting, if cliched, the feeling is creepy, if borrowed, the acting is decent, if forced; nothing is awful until it all starts to group together and you wonder where you’ve seen this all before. Wilde only takes, she doesn’t give, and that’s a huge problem, her huge problem, and that’s why she’s not ready to be a real director of real movies. This should be cool & fun to watch, but the train goes off the rails too often, the sincerity is never present, and it’s like the puppet master keeps bumbling & dropping the strings until the whole set is revealed & collapses. Stiles is fine, Pugh is always great, Pine is my hero; they aren’t the problem, and neither is the recycled story; talent will out, but so will its lack.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆