Don’t Worry Darling
On second thought maybe you should worry after all
Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
2 / 5
So there’s this old short story that some of you may have encountered in school: “The Lady, or the Tiger?” by Frank Stockton. The story (which dates to 1882) is taught for a variety of reasons, but the big ones are the opportunity it provides for English classes to talk about cliffhanger endings and moral dilemmas (the latter providing obvious fodder for the inevitable 5-paragraph-essay assignment). When the credits rolled on Don’t Worry Darling, I couldn’t help but think of “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and the film suffers by comparison.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you can probably already guess where the movie is going. I certainly could. If I say it’s a Stepford Wives highball with a Matrix chaser, nothing about that probably surprises you. Alice and Jack live an idealized married life in Victory, a remote and carefully central-planned 1950s company-town community. All the men work at Headquarters on top-secret (and extremely lucrative) “projects”. All the women keep house in their flawlessly manicured Mid-century modern homes, doing flawlessly manicured Mid-century modern homemaking tasks and enjoying the creature comforts (the community pool, the “shops”) of life in their flawlessly manicured compound. The setting is rendered perfectly; director Olivia Wilde seems to really love this particular fashion vintage (she even manages to sneak in Dita Von Teese), and those with similar tastes will find plenty of eye candy here. Alice spends her days in domestic tradwife bliss, seeing Jack off in the morning with a kiss, meeting him at the door with a cocktail and dinner, and falling asleep beside him each night after a bout of passionate (and mutually satisfying) lovemaking. However, she begins to suspect something is terribly wrong in Victory, and her curiosity leads to horror. But let’s be real: you knew all that from the trailer.
Once the plot develops past what’s in the trailer, things get muddy. The movie gets a little lost in its own setting, so the “awful truth” revelations get packed into the final act like sardines. The reveals come too fast and start to look like lazy cribbing from other movies. Real questions stay unanswered, previous wrinkles lasting too long and compounding into the next wrinkles. By the time the big cliffhanger ending hits, it’s all a tangled mess. I feel like I can see where it wants to go; there are tantalizing questions here about relationship dynamics, the gendered yin-yang of breadwinning and homemaking, humanity’s general desire for structure and what might be sacrificed to keep it, and the possible conflict between staying blissfully ignorant versus working through the painful truth. Like “The Lady, or the Tiger?” the film feels like it wants us to talk about these things after the movie, but the bones of these questions never get enough narrative meat on them to make them palatable, so it’s too easy to dismiss the whole thing as terribly backward and irredeemably problematic. That wastes the potential of the big questions, making the whole experience far more frustrating than entertaining.
2 stars of 5: I didn’t like it, though there might be enough here to be thought provoking for the right kind of cinema-going philosophers (especially if they’ve read “The Lady, or the Tiger?”).