Don’t Wor­ry Darling

Flo­rence Pugh is one of our most promis­ing young actress­es who has built up an impres­sive career since her break­out role in Lady Mac­beth – she has shown a com­mit­ment to work­ing with inter­est­ing direc­tors and tak­ing on roles which chal­lenge her as an artist. It’s dif­fi­cult to see, then, what exact­ly it was about Don’t Wor­ry Dar­ling that inter­est­ed her – the role of Alice, a young woman liv­ing in a hyper­stylised, appar­ent­ly utopi­an com­mu­ni­ty named Vic­to­ry, has very lit­tle dimen­sion, despite Pugh’s valiant efforts to pro­vide per­son­al­i­ty to a thin­ly-sketched sci-fi hero­ine we’ve seen a hun­dred times before.

The com­mu­ni­ty of Vic­to­ry, with its kitschy colours and mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern aes­thet­ics, is pop­u­lat­ed by young cou­ples and their fam­i­lies who adhere to a strict rou­tine. The men go to work every morn­ing while the women tend to their homes and chil­dren, and then the men return home, expect­ing din­ner on the table and a drink imme­di­ate­ly placed in their hand. Some­times there are glam­orous soirees, where they lis­ten to jazz and dance with reck­less aban­don. Alice (Pugh) and Jack (Har­ry Styles) are hap­py here, along with their cou­ple friends Bun­ny (Olivia Wilde), Fred (Nick Kroll), Peg (Kate Berlant) and Peter (Asif Ali), all under the watch­ful eye of Victory’s leader Frank (Chris Pine) and his glam­orous wife Shel­ley (Gem­ma Chan).

But there’s a glitch in the sys­tem – anoth­er house­wife, Mar­garet (KiKi Layne) has become unsta­ble after the dis­ap­pear­ance of her son. She main­tains that some­thing is being hid­den from them, despite the assur­ances from Jack, Frank and the oth­er hus­bands that every­thing is tick­ety-boo. Nev­er­the­less, Alice grows sus­pi­cious of Vic­to­ry and Frank’s inten­tions, and sets out to find the truth. The film takes heavy inspi­ra­tion from Ira Levin’s The Step­ford Wives, as well as The Matrix and The Tru­man Show, which inhibits its abil­i­ty to inno­vate some­what – there’s a sense through­out the film that we’ve seen it all before.

Pugh has pre­cious lit­tle to do as Alice, who is less a char­ac­ter and more a series of strung-togeth­er clich­es, but her hard­est chal­lenge is per­form­ing oppo­site the vacant Har­ry Styles, whose act­ing is so stiff and self-con­scious it’s impos­si­ble to take him seri­ous­ly, much less believe this is a char­ac­ter capa­ble of the things even­tu­al­ly revealed in the film’s com­i­cal­ly pre­dictable twist. The sup­port­ing cast are sim­i­lar­ly under­served by the script, and it’s odd to think that Katie Sil­ber­man – who wrote snap­py dia­logue and vivid char­ac­ters in Set It Up and Books­mart – miss­es the mark so bad­ly this time around.

Infi­nite­ly bet­ter than the script and major­i­ty of per­for­mances are Don’t Wor­ry Darling’s craft ele­ments – par­tic­u­lar­ly John Powell’s score and Ari­anne Phillips’ cos­tume design – but these aren’t enough to pre­vent Wilde’s sopho­more fea­ture from feel­ing rid­dled with sci-fi clich­es, and under­cooked in con­cep­tion. The world of Vic­to­ry (and the world beyond it) don’t feel lived-in, instead paint­ed with the very broad­est of strokes, and when you stop to con­sid­er some of the ele­ments for more than a sec­ond, it’s obvi­ous this isn’t a world that has much thought behind it.

There’s no sense of why we should care about Alice’s jour­ney because we nev­er real­ly know who Alice is, or what’s at stake. It’s not quite unwatch­able, but for all the claims Olivia Wilde has made since the film’s announce­ment about its fem­i­nist ele­ments, it’s a fair­ly rote and unimag­i­na­tive sto­ry of escap­ing from the patri­archy – one that’s been told before and told much better.