‘Don’t Worry Darling’ Movie Review (Venice Film Festival 2022): Olivia Wilde’s High-Concept Thriller Is ‘Black Mirror’ For The Girlboss Set

The premiere of Don’t Worry Darling has been marked by frenzied speculation. There’s the alleged fallout between director Olivia Wilde and star Florence Pugh, with added intrigue by way of male lead Harry Styles and Shia LaBeouf, the actor he replaced. The movie itself practically fell out of the conversation, so much so that conventional wisdom predicted the movie would be as messy on-screen as its release was off-screen. Now that it has premiered at the Venice Film Festival, let the record show that the result is far more banal. It’s not catastrophic – just clichéd.

Working from a script by Booksmart scribe Katie Silberman, Wilde dabbles in the high-concept suburban psychodrama reminiscent of Pleasantville or The Truman Show. Florence Pugh’s Alice and Harry Styles’ Jack are two halves of a sexually satisfied couple living in the planned desert community of Victory. The symmetry of the mid-century Palm Springs aesthetic echoes the utopian ideals of its slick but suspicious founder, Chris Pine’s Frank. “There is beauty in control,” the townspeople take as their motto, and that certainly shows up in the routinized nature of gender performance. The husbands go off to work in “development of progressive materials,” while the wives stay home and tend to the house.

As it always goes, things that look too good to be true usually are. Wilde hires a coterie of competent craftspeople to help create a world that would be cozy enough to keep questions at bay. Costume designer Arianne Phillips has the attractive cast looking chic as they traipse about the gorgeous interiors of Katie Byron and Mary Florence Brown. Meanwhile, Matthew Libatique’s sunny photography gives the film a sleekness that cannot help but strike as uncanny.

It’s fun to luxuriate in the façades for a bit, though Don’t Worry Darling can often feel like peering into a Mad Men-themed COVID costume party featuring some ludicrously attractive people. Wilde casts an eclectic group of actors to fill out the world of Victory, mixing comedians like Kate Berlant and Nick Kroll with more traditional thespians like KiKi Layne and Gemma Chan to uneasy effect. The tonal balance feels unsettled, and not just as a reflection of their surroundings.

Wilde also never quite figures out how to harness the wattage of star Harry Styles, either, in only his second major film role. He can smile and smolder like the best of the smooth operating matinee idol, but he flounders when juxtaposed against Pugh’s mastery of technical aspects of acting. The spotty accent work that went viral pre-release is just the most notable manifestation of this roughness. It often feels as if Styles is spinning a wheel of regional dialects to decide how he will deliver each line. Though the ending of Don’t Worry Darling tries to explain this away as a character choice, it feels like a thin reed of justification. Luckily for Styles, he’s far from the most egregious element Wilde tries to retcon into cleverness.

Once the fantasy starts to crumble as Alice’s curiosity gets piqued by strange occurrences, it becomes clear just how unprepared the film is to operate on anything other than a surface level. Wilde can ape the look of simulation thrillers, but her film simply cannot compare to their intellectual might. She substitutes surrealist interludes of Alice’s torment for smart commentary on conformity. Don’t Worry Darling trades in obvious visual metaphors and familiar motifs (ever seen a mirror represent the split self?) as the script staves off the big reveal of what’s actually going on in Victory.

Many times, it feels as if Wilde shot the visual lookbook she compiled more than the actual screenplay. Perhaps Silberman staves off her inevitable reveal until the third act because it cannot hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. The film pulls back the curtain when the action reaches such a fever pitch that it’s easy to gloss over all the implications contained within its big plot conceit. Don’t Worry Darling is so focused on preaching that it forgets about practicality. It’s a supersized Black Mirror episode whose vocabulary does not extend beyond “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.”

Yet even when the film spins its wheels in predictable, expected territory, Don’t Worry Darling has a true saving grace in star Florence Pugh. The script asks her character to act in implausible or inconsistent ways, but Pugh always roots Alice’s decision-making in an imminently believable ferocity of spirit. Her incandescent rage shines so brightly that it could light an entire film. She’s capable of finding humanity even within a script that possesses an incredibly flimsy understanding of people’s motivations and machinations.

Don’t Worry Darling is desperate for relevancy, but it’s not really equipped for much more than showing nice gowns and pretty people in psychologically perilous situations. That might do the trick in a more passive viewing environment where distracted viewers engage with the images more than the ideas. For the grand scale fantasy Wilde envisions with this studio film, however, this large mass of empty spectacle is disappointingly dull. That result beats an outright disaster, though.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.