Don't Worry Darling

I suppose I should say that I know this film has been in the celebrity gossip that masquerades as news for all the wrong reasons. I know Wilde has been accused of running a terrible lot, Florence Pugh refused to do publicity for the film and the likes. But I try my best to avoid this sort of nonsense, I know of it because it’s been discussed in reviews of the film and the like. So I’m really reviewing the film on the basis of what I saw in the cinema and not the celebrity drama.

This film owes, despite what Olivia Wilde may try to make you believe, a huge debt to The Stepford Wives. That’s not to say it’s a remake, it’s clearly an update and the way the robot wives from the original have been updated is even more disturbing to be honest.

Where to start with this film, the excellent, the dubious or the bad?

Let’s start with the bad.

Whoever cast Chris Pine really screwed up. Don’t get me wrong, of that crop of acting Chrises who burst onto the movie scene at about the same time (Hemsworth, Pine and Pratt), he’s my second favourite and he appears to be a nice guy (or at least keeps the ways he’s a dickhead private). But that’s the problem. He’s meant to be our big bad and I just don’t believe it. There are points at which he essentially monologues the variations on the villain-to-hero “I’m clever, you’re stupid, I’m going to win” speech (“No, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond”) and, for me, it lands with the threat of a two-year old having a tantrum. Two year olds are load and bloody annoying, and if I’d just had it for days, it could make me angry, but there’s no menace in what they do. Pine’s delivery has no menace while his words, which are truly scary when you stop and think about what is being said and done - they’re a masterpiece of gaslighting, are totally at odds with this. Think of your drunk mate trying to do “I had him with some fava beans and a nice chianti” and compare it to the original. Sadly, Pine is at the drunk mate end of the spectrum.

Then we have the pacing. The story, overall, is good. But it’s loosely in four acts (rather than the traditional three) but they’re unequal in length. There’s an idyllic 50’s life, then a gradual increase in weirdness that doesn’t quite fit, followed by a kind of search for the truth (“you can’t handle the truth!”) and finally a resolution. The resolution being short is fine but, honestly, I could have done with the 50’s idyll being half the length as well so we had more time spent exploring the ways it didn’t quite work and the search for the truth. I’d quite like a short extra act or post-credits scene too. I’m not sure there’s enough for a sequel but just something to show what’s next would have been nicer than more 50’s dream.

The dubious. 'Arry S'yles and his Estuary English. OMG, I haven’t heard so many swallowed t's, expressive-k’s and so on in years. Living up in Tyneside you don’t get a lot of Estuary English unless it’s on TV. But at those times it’s against a background of other British accents and isn’t sticking out like a sore thumb. Against a background of American accents, it’s brutal. You’ll notice below I don’t mention tradecraft directly as part of being a film star. While you can argue about whether Sean Connery was a star or not, he certainly never did any accent work! But Styles isn’t there yet and, to my ear, that soft Scottish accent sounds smoother against an American accent (even when it sounds horribly out of place as a Russian submarine commander or similar).

Also dubious were some of the insert shots. There are various points as things get weird when Alice (Pugh) has unusual visual inserts. While I’m pretty sure they’re new, they reminded me of Busby Berkeley dance scenes and some bad psychedelic movies. Having seen the whole film I understand why, certainly for one and while not wholly for the other I think I understand the intent. I don’t mind waiting until the end to more fully understand the film, especially one like this, but these scenes feel wilfully jarring in a way that I don’t think they had to. Olivia Wilde has a good eye for a lot of other scenes so I assume these did, visually, what she wanted too. For me they didn’t land the way I assume she wanted though.

The good? Florence Pugh. I’ve followed her and her career (in a fangrrl way, not a crazy stalker way) since I saw her in The Little Drummer Girl on the BBC about five years ago. There are a couple of working definitions of a film star. One is an actor that guarantees bums on seats and thus the bottom line. The other is the actor who can pick up the whole film and just carry it all, apparently effortlessly. To my mind, and bank balance, Pugh fulfils the first of these and based on this film she also fulfils the second (it’s the first time she’s really been asked to, she was the lead in Midsommar but there were a lot of others who carried that film and the screen time with her). She’s not quite in every second but over the 123 minutes, she’s probably in almost two hours of the movie. She really does carry it all.

There are some interesting, if absolutely disturbing to downright frightening, ideas in Don’t Worry Darling as you might imagine from an updated Stepford Wives. Nothing frightening in the horror movie sense, more a “who the af thinks like this? Oh, wait, the whole manosphere does…” The ending is a glorious response to the whole idea as well. It’s worth seeing just for that. But if you haven’t seen Florence Pugh in serious action because you didn’t want to watch Midsommar here’s your chance to really see her bust out her acting chops in a way the MCU never demanded of her.

Bechdel Test: Pass. This might surprise you on first read but the wives talk to each other about shopping and the like. It’s not talking about men, it’s named female characters so technically it’s a pass. It’s ironic, this is largely one of the most un-Bechdel like films I can remember (there are a few exceptions with all male casts like The Railway Men which was about a group of former POWs so there was a reason for no women) but it still passes.

Ko Test: Fail. There are WOC. They all speak in English. But… not enough. Between them, maybe, just five scenes.

Russo Test: Fail. This is a fantasy world created for straight men who want submissive 50’s housewives. There are narrative reasons that make sense but everyone is straight. There are, equally, narrative reasons why the supposed most common male fantasy of a guy and two women threesome or the bored housewives exploring their inner bi/pan/lesbian tendencies can’t happen here.