4 / 10
Official trailer
Don’t Worry Darling is the psychological thriller whose production controversies generated more public discussion than the film itself.
Olivia Wilde directed. Katie Silberman wrote from a story by Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, and Silberman. Florence Pugh plays Alice Chambers, a young 1950s housewife in a planned desert community called Victory. Harry Styles plays Jack Chambers, her husband. Chris Pine plays Frank, the community’s charismatic founder. Olivia Wilde plays Bunny, Alice’s friend. Gemma Chan plays Shelley.
The plot follows Alice’s suspicions about Victory and her discovery that the community is a virtual reality simulation in which men have trapped women against their consent. The film made approximately eighty-seven million dollars worldwide on a thirty-five million dollar budget. The critical reception was mixed. The production controversies occupied more public attention than the film’s content. The film exists primarily as a case study in how a production’s ideological premise and its surrounding press drama can swallow the work itself.
I came away annoyed. Florence Pugh is doing work good enough for a much better film, and the movie wraps her in a sermon about husbands that it spells out in the third act as if I might have missed it. The press drama around this production was more fun to read about than the script was to sit through.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film’s third-act premise is that men have trapped their wives’ consciousnesses in a 1950s virtual reality simulation while the women’s bodies remain unconscious in the real world. The husbands have ordinary jobs in the present day and visit the simulation through neural interface. The wives have no knowledge of this arrangement and can’t consent to it. The film’s argument is that male preference for traditional gender roles is so dangerous that men would imprison their wives’ minds instead of face women who have choices.
The premise is the wokeness in its purest form. The film’s villain isn’t a specific man or a specific ideology.
The villain is male preference for traditional femininity. Jack Chambers loves his wife. The film presents his love as the cause of her imprisonment. Frank, the community’s founder, has built the simulation as a service to men who feel inadequate in the real world.
The thesis here is that ordinary American men, given the technological means, would imprison the women they claim to love before they’d face a world where those women might leave them.
The argument isn’t subtle, and the third-act exposition makes it explicit. I think that’s the script’s worst choice. A thriller this invested in suspicion should let me work out the horror for myself, and this one stops the story to read me its thesis.
The Florence Pugh victim arc is the film’s emotional spine. Alice’s suspicions are real. Her perceptions are correct. Everyone around her is gaslighting her, and the gaslighting is literally a coordinated male conspiracy. The film positions female intuition against male institutional power and validates the intuition through plot reveal. The argument is that women who feel something is wrong with their lives in traditional arrangements are correctly perceiving something the men have hidden from them. The simulation is the metaphor for marriage made literal.
For Writers
A film whose central metaphor literalizes a political argument can work if the metaphor justifies its scale. Don’t Worry Darling’s simulation premise dramatizes marriage-as-imprisonment as actual imprisonment. The metaphor’s force depends on whether the audience accepts the equivalence. The lesson is that ideological allegory has to work as story first. If the audience doesn’t buy the equivalence the metaphor depends on, the metaphor reads as ideological assertion instead of dramatic insight. The story has to convince the audience that the equivalence makes emotional sense.
The Production Controversy
Before release, the press tour generated multiple controversies that became the film’s primary public identity. Reports of conflicts between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh during production. The dismissal of Shia LaBeouf and conflicting accounts of whether he was fired or quit. Wilde’s relationship with Harry Styles during production.
The viral Venice Film Festival moment that appeared to show Styles spitting at Pine. Pugh’s notable absence from most publicity events. The combined effect was that the film became a story about its own production drama instead of about its content.
The press cycle damaged the film’s reception. Audiences came in with expectations shaped by the controversies instead of by the film itself. The marketing position couldn’t compete with the gossip narrative.
The film’s actual ideological commitments went largely unexamined in mainstream coverage because the production drama was easier to write about. Its defenders argued that the controversy itself was misogynist, that the female director was being treated more harshly than male directors with comparable production issues. The defense generated more controversy. The cycle continued.
I don’t think the film gets to blame the gossip alone for that. If the story on screen had been stronger, the press tour would have had something better to talk about, and sadly the most interesting material in the movie ended up buried under its own publicity.
For Writers
A production’s public profile can permanently shape how the work is received. The controversies surrounding its making largely obscured Don’t Worry Darling’s actual content. The lesson is that the publicity work around a creative project is part of how the project will be perceived. Production drama generates attention that often doesn’t benefit the work. Manage the public profile deliberately. The story of how the work was made matters to how the work is received.
The Pugh Performance
Florence Pugh’s performance is the film’s strongest individual element by a considerable margin. Pugh plays Alice with specific commitment to the gradual unraveling of her conviction that her life is normal. The performance is calibrated. Pugh shows the cracks in Alice’s certainty before Alice consciously acknowledges them. The audience reads the suspicion through the performance before the script confirms it. The work is exceptional.
Pugh’s work exceeds the script’s. Her scenes are more committed than the surrounding material. The third-act revelation about Victory’s actual nature wouldn’t work as well as it does without her work winning the audience’s investment in Alice’s reality. The performance is the foundation that the film’s argument rests on. Without Pugh, the film has no center. With her, the film has more than the script alone provides.
Pugh is the reason this isn’t lower than a 4. She gives Alice more nerve and more doubt than the script ever writes down for her, and I kept rooting for the performance even while the movie around her kept letting me down.
For Writers
A lead performance that holds a film together can raise weaker surrounding material. Florence Pugh’s Alice is the foundation that Don’t Worry Darling’s revelations depend on. The script’s third-act work gets its weight from her performance. The lesson is that the protagonist performance is the audience’s primary access to the story. Strong work in the lead can hold up a film that’s weak elsewhere. Cast carefully. The performer at the center needs to be able to hold the film together.
Craft Note
The Busby Berkeley dance-floor hallucination sequence is the film’s most accomplished individual passage. Alice slips into a pattern-vision while Frank addresses a crowd. The sequence layers black-and-white kaleidoscopic dance imagery against Alice’s growing panic. The passage runs about three minutes and is strange in ways the rest of the film aspires to and rarely achieves. The Busby Berkeley sequence shows that Olivia Wilde and her cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Black Swan, A Star Is Born, Mother!) could stage true psychological cinema when given the right material.
The sequence is the film’s argument for the work the production almost made.
Should you skip Don’t Worry Darling?
4/10, and I’m more irritated than bored. Florence Pugh’s performance and the Busby Berkeley dance-floor sequence show the film this could have been, and those two things are why I didn’t go lower.
The rest is a thriller that decided its message mattered more than its mystery, spelled that message out in the third act, and then got buried under its own press tour. Watch it for Pugh and the dance floor, and expect to feel lectured.
