Movie Review: Don´t Worry Darling Is Not A Worry At All
Watching Don´t Worry Darling, I feel kind of bad because it was actually pretty good. Would I place it on my Top 10 best films of 2022… no. Yet, I have a feeling that the level of petty media coverage it has received could, potentially, place it on some worst, which is unfortunate because the film truly tries to churn a ¨Stepford Wives¨ trope into something more Hitchcockian and does not fail.
In the words of Harry Styles, I liked ¨the movie because it felt like a movie.¨ While flashy and splashy with present- aesthetic of cinematography and melodrama, the movie emotes a sort of early- mid 2000s vibe. In essence, it looks like a film done now about a sort of era back then but with the overall frequency of a decade ago: when movies felt more like a theater thing than a streamed one. Hence, I kind of understood what Harry meant after seeing the film, it is more relishable for a theater, especially because of Pugh´s overall dominance as our heroine:Alice
Pugh is a force, as an actress, and her character Alice carries the film through what can feel like so many emotions and plot twists, you would have thought somebody just through spaghetti at a wall and said, ¨However many stick is how many plot points we will try to have!¨ Yes, that is a lot of spaghetti, but it all comes back to one singular sauce ….. misogyny.
That feeling you got from the trailer, that this was a Stepford Wives reboot is not wrong, but I have to give it to Miss Wilde…. she delivers a much wilder, even campier ride. This film was unexpected in how it hand over a message that Miss Wilde has been very eager to purport in her films and, maybe, in her life….. men do not own us but they really do try. From the onset, the film gives away that this little town called Victory, owned by Frank (Chris Pine) and supported by the likes of Alice’s husband (Harry Styles as Jack) is creepy with an undertone of sexism and violence. Once the plot-twist is revealed, here is where the film gets a little murky.
In a way, where Stepford Wives or even Jordan Peele´s Get Out saves the major, psychological reveal for the end, Wilde uses it as her launchpad, which gives makes the film go crazy with tension, twists, and slight repetitiveness. We get it…. men suck and someone needs to save Alice! Yet, in riding solely on Pugh´s ability to convey the strange, frightfulness of being awake in a den of sleeping lions, the movie never goes beyond her performance to become overall impactful or innovative in its message, even though, again, it was good.
Styles is good in his role, and I did leave wishing the film had more of Pine. The sneering, diabolical energy between him and Pugh gives the film and intriguing, but unexplored ¨cat and mouse¨ dynamic that could have helped its further distinguish it desire to bring nuance to what can feel like an ancient theme: women´s bodies are not men’s objects, and it is still very terrifying to live in a world where many men would not argue with Frank in saying, ¨Victory is a having a happy home run by a good wife running it.¨
