Spoilers Ahead!
When I attended the theatrical release of the star-studded movie from Olivia Wilde’s newest project, Don’t Worry Darling, I had no idea what the movie was supposed to entail. Watching the trailer back in July, along with other viewers in the comments of YouTube, we could not make sense of what the plot would be. The trailer showed clips of the two leads, Florence Pugh and international heartthrob Harry Styles, living in a 1950s dystopia with scenes of dancing, sex, Florence’s character putting her head in saran wrap, and more. Yeah, I could not make sense of it. I knew that as a huge Harry Styles fan I would support wherever he would venture with his projects….no matter how strange it seemed.
At the film’s premiere date, I was shockingly surprised. Beyond the bright-colored houses, pastel dirndl dresses, and endless sunny days, the audience is introduced to the town of Victory. A seemingly unique contrast to the modern world we are currently in where women stay at home, cook, clean, while their husbands work all day and come back at night. It gives off a very utopian feel, while simultaneously giving this almost too good to be true vibe. But of course with utopias, everything is not always what it seems to be. The main couple, sweet housewife Alice, played by Pugh , and her charismatic husband, Jack, played by Styles, are portray to be in the ideal honeymoon phase of a marriage; no children, fun midnight drives, sexual rendevous, and hanging out drinking with their friends. Alice is the perfect housewife; she cooks, cleans, does laundry, and makes herself look pretty for her husband every day. But as time goes on, the utopian stanture and seemingly perfect marriage we’ve been seeing starts to break down gradually. Alice’s friend, Margaret (played by KiKi Layne) has been acting strange, sort of like an anomaly compared to the happy-go-lucky people we’ve been seeing in Victory. Alice starts to notice and points out the difference to her friends, but no one really ever pays attention to her concerns. They instead just brush it off. She starts investigating herself about what is going on, all while seemingly being in this pseudo version of two worlds she alternates from by doing weird things, like wrapping her head in syran wrap. She starts to see that her marriage might not be as perfect as she thinks, and that this utopia is much more than a perfect place.
When Alice realizes that the pseudo vision of the two worlds she keeps hallucinating is indeed a portal between the modern and virtual world, things start to come to speed. Alice has a vision of herself in a modern day world where she is a successful surgeon who works late nights. Jack is unemployed and craves his wife’s affection, but Alice is too burnt out to give it to him. Soon after, there is an eerie scene of Jack putting these weird VR goggles on himself and Alice in a bed where she is unconscious, giving them entry to the perfect town of Victory. The plot twist was not something me and other viewers had expected to see, but nevertheless it was thought-provoking. After, Alice starts hallucinating again and comes to her senses when the real world starts to slip into her mind. She freaks out, Alice and Jack have an argument that leads to Jack almost killing her. Once she realizes what he has done, she overtakes him and kills him. Alice then runs away from the security of the town and goes back to a glass seperator that seemingly “wakes’ ‘ you up from the hallucinations. The movie ends with a black screen and her breathlessly panting.
After watching the movie, I genuinely enjoyed the film. Florence’s acting was amazing, she knew how to shift the emotions very seamlessly in this character trying to figure out a strange situation. Harry’s acting was good too, but what stuck to me the most was how the story was portrayed. I started to think about the cruelty of Jack’s character taking away his wife’s free will, and putting her involuntarily into his version of what they should be like as a couple. During the last scene between them, Alice calls him out on this fact, but Jack responds saying he thought it was because she was miserable living her life in the real world. This scene alone made me think a lot about the male patriarchy. I think we are living in an age where men want to be able to dominate women, in any way they can. We see and hear stories all the time of women like Alice being in a relationship with a man like Jack, where he is deciding what’s best for her. It made so much sense that this world they were living in, only reflected the ideals of his thinking. He gets to go to work, and she gets to stay home to cook and clean rather than getting a job. This is a stark difference from the modern world. These ideas are of the past generation, that many people, particularly men, still believe in. Jack was most likely terrified of Alice being the breadwinner for them, and to take his power back to satisfy his ego, he put her into this world without her consent so he could live his dream without thinking about hers. Jack is the essence of men who desire this lifestyle for their female partners.
I mean we have all seen the Tiktoks, Twitter threads, Reddit stories, about how women gave up their dreams to satisfy their male partners at home. We have seen the after effects of such cases, how damaging it is to women and their mental and physical beings. In this situation, Alice really had no choice in the matter, which only makes it more sinister. As it shows Jack was the only one making the decision to put them in the virtual world for his own selfish reasons.
It also shocked me how perfectly binary and flawless Victory as a whole is for women and men. Women do not even know how to drive in this world, they all use the same trolley, meaning there is no escape if they really wanted to leave their husbands. They also do ballet as an exercise, which is heavily based on perfection and symmetry. Men go to their jobs and hang with the boys. They have all the power within their hands, literally, as all the men know they have put their wives in a world they did not consent to be a part of. No one really ever questions that women are supposed to be the perfect unproblematically filling housewife roles, in life and in their relationships. It makes sense that the movie’s title is on-par with Alice’s relentless need to find out what is really going on while everyone around her does not want to listen or hushes her concerns by giving a “don’t worry” attitude.
It has been ingrained ever since we were little that a “dominant” man would be the one to sweep us off our feet and the females/women have to submit to them. I believe that this is a harmful way of thinking. Women should be able to choose the paths they want for themselves without a man’s involvement, or a man’s intervention. As we see with Alice and Jack, the effects of such a thing are damaging and downright selfish. Don’t Worry Darling might be the most strangest, dangerous way of showing how far man are willing to go, to keep up our male patriarchal world.