On paper, the Palm Springs-esque-retro-utopia Victory, with its minimally furnished mid-century villas and boozy dinner parties, seems like the perfect place to live. Under the dreamy southern California sun, the fresh attractive families of Victory find everything they could ever want and need.
Who wouldn’t want to be Alice (Florence Pugh) and go shopping all afternoon with the other housewives, then come home to her charming husband, Jack (played by Harry Styles), who services her on the dining room table before he’s even had a mouthful of the roast and mashed potatoes?
However, Olivia Wilde lets us know right away that something’s not quite right in Victory. Everything is a little too perfect, too tidy, and too consistent — just like the wives’ smiles.
Every day is monotonous. Early in the morning, all the men leave to go work for their top-secret jobs at the Victory Project, which they of course cannot discuss with any of the women. Meanwhile, the wives happily send them off with a kiss goodbye before they go on to spend the day cleaning the house, possibly taking a dance class, and undoubtedly enjoying some day drinking.
But as time goes on, Alice starts to doubt this picture-perfect world she lives in. As she learns more about the place, her uneasiness transforms from nervous suspicion to genuine horror. She begins to experience nightmares that jolt her awake at night and see images that come to her in impressionistic slivers. I think that at some point, Wilde began to rely too excessively on certain black-and-white visuals of Busby Berkeley-style dancers or close-ups of eyes. Instead of becoming alarming or unsettling, they become boring and repetitive.
I must compliment Florence Pugh’s acting; it was sensational and felt like a breath of fresh air. I believe that this movie created room for some extremely disturbing scenes and gave her the opportunity to sink into horror in a way that only she appears to know how. She carried out every scene with perfection, even when they felt a touch heavy-handed.
It felt as though Don’t Worry Darling was leading up to a big reveal or a confrontation between Alice and Frank, who controls not just the women, but the men, too. Maybe even a brawl between the wives to demonstrate how misogyny imprisons women. Instead, the conclusion presents a dull past that is made worse by its unpredictability. The brief glimpses of a more interesting further narrative were too quickly shut down. I can’t shake off the feeling that the most interesting part of Alice’s story was left untold.
Let’s just say that after the movie, you’ll have lots of questions, and those discussions will likely be more insightful and thought-provoking than the movie itself.
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