Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling

It’s easy, competent, and tedious.
Photograph: New Line Cinema
Arriving on the Venice Movie Pageant on a quickly rising tidal wave of poisonous buzz, Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Fear Darling is neither as dangerous as some are clearly hoping will probably be, nor nearly as good because it most likely must be to beat the general public relations nightmare its press rollout has change into. Listening to all of the rumors of a troubled set, of actors falling out with the director, one might need anticipated a cacophonous, cobbled-together disaster. If solely. The movie is easy, competent, (largely) well-acted, and merely tedious.
Set in a fastidiously manicured, midcentury suburban utopia positioned smack in the midst of a desert, Darling explores the rising self-awareness of a younger housewife, Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh), whose doting husband Jack (Harry Kinds) units off each morning with all the opposite males to a high secret job the place he works with what’s referred to solely as “progressive supplies.” There are overtones right here of the “secret cities” of the Manhattan Mission, the pre-fab residential communities constructed by the U.S. navy throughout the improvement of the atom bomb. The Chambers’ neighborhood is a part of one thing referred to as “the Victory Mission,” the place all the pieces is cleanly coordinated and regimented. The place males are women and men are girls, the place steaks and cocktails are ready when hubby will get residence, and the place the characters are rewarded with a lot of pleased youngsters and/or a lot of nice intercourse.
Clearly, one thing is deeply improper right here. The wives all wave their arms in unison at their husbands. The boys drive off in gleaming, uniform, multi-colored automobiles into the desert. The ladies go to bop courses the place they’re instructed, “There may be magnificence in management. There may be grace in symmetry.” On the radio, the voice of Frank (Chris Pine), the Victory Mission’s chief, provides forcefully said bromides similar to “You’re worthy of the life you’ve chosen.” Later, he’ll speak about how the enemy of progress is chaos. On the Venice press convention for the movie, Wilde and her solid talked about how regardless of the interval trappings of the film, it’s actually about right now. “The folks we’re enjoying had been actual folks in a world very a lot our personal,” Pine stated. He didn’t must say it. The film isn’t precisely delicate on this level.
So, the place does a narrative like this go, when it’s apparent proper from the get-go that there’s something deeply twisted occurring below its surfaces? Cinema has already given us two variations of The Stepford Wives, to not point out films like Suburbicon and Blue Velvet and Pleasantville and any variety of different movies in regards to the corrosive underbelly of nice, old style domesticity. (There are a number of different reference factors one may cite for Don’t Fear Darling, however they’d represent spoilers.) Films about utopias that change into dystopias both need to discover a strategy to make their utopias initially compelling, or get issues rolling in such dramatic or deranged vogue that we are able to’t assist however be riveted by the characters’ journeys of discovery.
Don’t Fear Darling, alas, does none of these items. It merely asks us to look at as Alice slowly realizes that one thing creepy lurks inside the Victory Mission, and that may get boring and repetitive after some time. Our protagonist’s rising consciousness comes through black-and-white visions of dancing women, in addition to concern for her next-door neighbor and once-close buddy, Margaret (KiKi Layne), whom we study misplaced her son out within the desert and hasn’t been the identical since. In the future, whereas driving the Victory trolley that carries the wives to their every day appointments, Alice sees a airplane falling from the sky behind a mountain. She tells the motive force and desires to go assist. “I don’t go that method,” he says, tensely. “That’s not my route.” This might need been a stunning second, however the group of Victory is so oppressively ordered and exact that it comes as little shock to us. So, we watch and bide our time as Alice expresses her shock, then units off into the desert on her personal. It’s by no means enjoyable when the viewers is so many steps forward of the characters.
The film, in its personal method, features just like the city of Victory itself. As a director, Wilde has a very good eye, and the movie’s many scenes of regimented grace have a pleasant visible pop. In her directorial debut, Booksmart, she used the story’s episodic construction to experiment with model and toss concepts on the display screen; the movie made a advantage out of chaos. Don’t Fear Darling makes a advantage out of orderliness, however that may solely go thus far. We maintain ready for the film to shock us, to shock us. We maintain ready for the chaos.
Inside this framework, Pugh does nervousness and terror properly, and she or he makes Alice’s gathering anxiousness as convincing as it may be, even when the script fails to provide her all that many attention-grabbing issues to do. As Bunny, Alice’s shut buddy and wise-cracking, cocktail-guzzling den mom to the clique of Victory wives, Wilde herself appears to be having a number of enjoyable. Pine makes for a uniquely charismatic proto-fascist cult chief; the movie receives a welcome jolt of power every time he’s onscreen. The weak hyperlink, sadly, is Kinds, who isn’t with out expertise, however who fails to provide Jack the dimensionality or inside battle that the character clearly wants, particularly in gentle of the place the film finally goes.
About that: This form of image has been performed sufficient occasions that at this level there are a couple of off-the-rack explanations for what may be occurring. Our minds have been fucked sufficient occasions that the fashionable mindfuck film has misplaced a lot of its energy to shock, particularly when it pronounces from its opening frames that will probably be a mindfuck film. In the end, Don’t Fear Darling goes for a reasonably acquainted twist — a revelation that can doubtless have already flitted throughout many viewers’ minds as they watched the film. However the clarification weirdly winds up being one of many strengths of the movie, as a result of Wilde brings to it sufficient fascinating grisliness that the twist successfully reframes most of what’s come earlier than. In different phrases, it brings that little bit of chaos the film has been sorely lacking. Is it sufficient? Most likely not. But it surely’s not a complete failure, both.
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