Don’t Worry Darling is the new film directed by Olivia Wilde and she has a small role in the film and stars Harry Styles as Jack Chambers and Florence Pugh as his wife Alice in an idyllic 1950s esque town called Victory where the husbands go to work on something called the Victory Project just outside of town and the wives stay home, go shopping and drink martinis and gossip all day and then cook for their husbands at night but Alice soon begins to suspect things aren’t what they seem to be when she sees a plane crash in the desert outside of town and this makes everyone around her angry.
I have been really looking forward to this movie for two reasons, firstly Olivia Wilde showed a lot of promise I felt in the directors chair with Booksmart, it was funny, heartfelt, had 2 great leads in Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as well as a terrific supporting performance by Billie Lourd plus the trailers for this movie looked sexy, psychotic and unsettling and I was fully on board but all this promise couldn’t possibly fail right.
Well sadly it did and when I walked out of this movie my immediate thought when looking at the poster for it was to go “Olivia I’m VERY disappointed” in the tone of the Old Man from Robocop when he chastises Dick Jones over the ED-209 failure in the board meeting as this movie was a big big big disappointment for me.
And the main reason for that is that very early on in this movie you begin to twitch in your head that things aren’t what they seem to be and begin to suspect that all of this is a kind of illusion and almost the entire rest of the film up until its climax takes all that time to get to the point that you have already gotten to and your just sitting there waiting for it to play bloody catch up.
And given the 1950s esque setting I thought “Okay this could be interesting” in terms of perhaps all of this being tied to a potential Nuclear War and the desert outside the boundary is irradiated due to radioactive fallout and the whole idea of the Victory Project is to do with Radiation harnessing and Uranium mining for a War effort that may or may not exist like War with Eurasia in 1984 (the novel of which was written just before the 50s) but instead when it reveals itself I just went “What the Fuck” in my cinema seat and it just felt so fucking unsatisfying.
And secondly I really really wished that this movie had really gone for it in terms of its psychosis and unsettling tone that the previews for it seemed to promise and had been perhaps more incisive in terms of its commentary, bolder with its psychotic moments, darker with its sex scenes and more unsettling that it ultimately is, there is a truly terrific MA15+/R18+ rated movie here that is stuck in a dull and unsatisfying M rated movie and it is badly hurt as a result.
So yeah that was Don’t Worry Darling and it is quite possibly my biggest movie heartbreak of this year, what could and should have been a terrific psychotic thriller is stuck in a dull, unsatisfying and fairly tame one and I wish that Olivia had done another script draft or 2 to let that MA15/R18 version come to the surface as that would’ve fulfilled that promise I so wanted from her after Booksmart, 1 out of 5.
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