This past weekend, Olivia Wilde’s sophomore feature, the drama-plagued Don’t Worry Darling, finally hit theaters to mixed reviews, a $19 million box-office opening (right in line with early guesstimates), and a B- CinemaScore, raising questions about the film’s long-term legs.
A mindfuck can be a welcome, destabilizing thing, but Don’t Worry Darling is so obvious in its attempt to evoke one that its self-consciousness ends up being self-defeating.(At least the missing comma from the film’s title is innocent.) Along the way, Don’t Worry Darling unfurls a series of moments that make you go, “Wait, what?” In an attempt to parse the film’s half-baked interior logic and sparse character motivations, we’ve compiled a list of lingering questions.
In her promotion for Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde talked up the music cue that Styles, her current boyfriend, wrote in five minutes for a snippet of music that haunts Alice in the film.Alice can’t remember where she heard it, just as she can’t remember her life before coming to Victory, and in the film’s final minutes, it’s revealed that in the outside world, Jack used to sing it to his girlfriend, hardworking surgeon Alice, before he went all unshowered, unemployed, long-haired incel.
Don’t Worry Darling doesn’t have to lay everything out for us, but none of these images and ideas feels interconnected or revelatory?Don’t Worry Darling flirts with horror in making Alice a witness, and occasionally a victim, of the aberrations in her home (walls that move and nearly crush her, empty eggshells, lost time, a mirror reflection that moves independently, à la Black Swan), and at one point she tests her reality by wrapping plastic wrap around her head?The latter may be what Don’t Worry Darling is going for, but if so, what’s causing the danger to Alice in the simulation!
Don’t Worry Darling is so ominous from the beginning that the film seems to encourage us to look for clues about what it all means?One of Don’t Worry Darling’s messiest elements is its Get Out–like use of Kiki Layne’s Margaret (the only Black woman with a speaking role in this film) to point out to Alice that something is wrong with Victory.And despite repeated allusions to how close Alice and Margaret used to be, we never see any of that.
But in Don’t Worry Darling, it’s a little too unintentionally reminiscent of the 1950s to have the pain of a Black woman launch a white woman’s feminism, no.
For a movie that presents itself like that GIF of Saoirse Ronan in Little Women passionately saying “Women have minds!” for two hours, Don’t Worry Darling is strangely slight on the lives of said women — except for Bunny, the character Wilde herself plays, who gets a backstory about missing children (maybe dead, maybe lost in a custody battle; the film is unclear about this) and is complicit with the simulation because she actually chose to live in it.These are absolutely nitpicky questions about the inner workings of Frank’s code, but Don’t Worry Darling invites such pondering and then doesn’t explain it.
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Let’s turn to the Variety profile in which Wilde says of Don’t Worry Darling’s sex scenes: “Men don’t come in this film?Only women here!” and “In hetero sex scenes in film, the focus on men as the recipients of pleasure is almost ubiquitous.” Sure, if you watch Don’t Worry Darling and stop the film before the final twist, the fact that Jack seemingly prefers catering to Alice is nice — he performs oral sex on her a couple of times, he fingers her, he brings her to orgasm.
Meanwhile, we don’t see Alice do the same to him, and I guess in that reading, Wilde is correct: “Men don’t come in this film.” But once the simulation is revealed, those sex scenes are absolutely recontextualized as Jack doing things to Alice’s body to which she cannot consent.
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