'Don't Worry Darling' has as many pitfalls as sexy people
And everyone is sexy.
The most talked-about movie of the year is finally here, and I saw it Saturday afternoon. If you’ve seen it, too, keep reading. If not, I won’t judge you for wanting to skip the theater and just read a newsletter about it instead, to be honest. Especially since it’s my newsletter.
It’s a long one, though, so get comfy before you dig in.
SPOILERS AHEAD
I want to get this out of the way up front: I gave this movie a 3.5 star review on Letterboxd, and while I am about to go into a long list of things that didn’t quite make sense about it, I don’t think
I’m going to break this down a bit so it’s not just a scramble of mess and words because that would just make a confusing movie more disorienting.
Incel Harry Styles will give me nightmares
Let me recap as best I can the plot of this movie.
Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice (Florence Pugh) are a young couple living a routine life nearly identical to their neighbors in the small, desert town of Victory. Jack works for the Victory Project, as do all the other men in town, and depart each day out into the desert as Alice and the other wives stay home to do everything a 50s housewife would. When they get home, all the couples have mind-boggling dining room table sex, or at least Jack and Alice do.
None of the wives quite know what the Victory Project is or what their husbands do. The Victory Project was founded by Frank (Chris Pine) who’s married to a doting wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan) just like all the other men in town.
But one of the wives, Margaret (Kiki Layne), has been “hallucinating” and acting out at special gatherings. Asking questions people clearly don’t want ask. Alice has a soft spot for her, but the other wives in town, mainly Bunny (Olivia Wilde) tell her to leave it alone. When Alice goes on a trolley ride to clear her head one day, she sees a plane crash in the mountains and goes to find it alone. Instead of the plane, she finds a structure on a mountain, touches it, and then wakes up back at home to Jack cooking dinner.
(I can’t remember the exact timing of this in the movie but) Alice then witnesses Margaret slit her own throat and fall off the roof of her house, but is pulled away when she tries to help her. The Victory doctor later tells Alice that Margaret is fine, that she just slipped, though we don’t see her again in the movie.
Alice begins having her own hallucinations that get increasingly worse throughout the movie. She begins to grow paranoid, has a confrontation with Frank during a dinner at her house and then manages to convince – or so she thinks – Jack to leave Victory with her.
But as she goes to get in the car with him, she’s dragged away, and interspersed of clips of Alice receiving what seems to be shock therapy, we see what her life was before.
She was a surgeon and dating a much uglier (and American) version of Jack. He had recently lost his job, forcing her to pick up extra shifts at the hospital to support them, and was spending all his time on a chat room. That chat room is how he found out about the Victory Project, which is essentially a virtual reality where you can live out life with a woman – without her permission – of your choosing by hooking her up to a machine. When the men leave the Victory simulation each morning, they’re exiting to keep the real, living, breathing women alive.
Alice is returned to Victory. She’s welcomed back with open arms and seemingly happy to be there again but quickly remembers what her real life was like again when triggered by a song Jack sings her in the real world. They get into a fight and Alice kills Jack by smashing him over the head with a glass. Bunny, who reveals that she chose to enter Victory and was not forced into it like most of the wives, tells Alice how to get out and there’s a big car chase that I’m too lazy to tell you about and that kind of ends up being irrelevant.
Alice makes it back to the real world, or so we’re led to believe, and the movie ends.
Harry Styles was set up to fail
There is no timeline where Harry Styles can pull off this role, I fear. While he looks beautiful the whole movie and his more, erm, romantic scenes made me squirm in the best way, he was not built to act opposite any of the highly talented performers in this film.
I mean, Florence Pugh is PHENOMENAL. I doubt she’ll get an Oscar nod because of all the drama around the film and the fact that it was so poorly received from a critical standpoint, but she deserves a Best Actress nom in my opinion.
I think the most evident moment these two are at different calibers when it comes to acting was the scene when Alice is taken away. She’s screaming, and you can hear the panic in her voice, and Harry’s just there very badly fake crying and yelling. It was one of the many moments the full theater of 20ish year old girls I saw this movie alongside giggled.
There were plenty of smaller roles Harry could’ve played in this movie that he could have done better at. There was just too much talent to contend with from Florence to Chris Pine to the couple moments he has with Nick Kroll’s character.
They also just made Harry tap dance like a puppet in the middle of the film? There was symbolism to it but he just looked so silly I could not keep a straight face.
That all said, I don’t know who I would’ve cast as Jack instead. Shia LeBeouf might have even been weirder in the role, but for the opposite reasons.
What was with the earthquakes?
I think for me this might be the biggest plot hole. Because like, even knowing what you know at the end, there’s not necessarily a real-world event you could correlate them to?
It could have made sense if the earthquakes occurred twice a day as the men entered and left the Victory Project, like the movement correlated with them getting up from bed in the real world and shaking the bodies of the women. But that wasn’t how they were set up, so I don’t really know what they were supposed to be besides maybe a white rabbit? Because I thought the earthquakes were a sign that they were testing bombs or something (I’ll get into my mid-movie theory on what was happening a bit later).
Here were my thoughts/possible explanations on some of the other “plot holes” and things I just found silly about the plot:
The red planes: A lot of people on TikTok seem to think this was the lasers passing over the women’s eyes, but the planes weren’t appearing often enough for that. I think it must have something to do with new people entering the project or people leaving it, though even that doesn’t really make sense with what we know.
Bunny being the one to choose the simulation: At first I was like, ‘Why is it Nick Kroll’s character leaving each day, then?!’ But then I realized that they probably chose to go in together so that they could have kids because they weren’t able to in the real world.
Shelley killing Frank: Woo, yay, girl power moment but it was so… meaningless? Came completely out of nowhere as one of Shelley’s biggest scenes in the movie was her standing up for Frank during the dinner party. And we didn’t see anything that happened with her character after so the point was just completely moot.
Why did Jack die?: As far as we know, the women in the Victory Project did not die in real life If they died in the simulation. They were just kicked out, along with their husbands. So then why did Jack die with one bonk to the head?
I know there’s more that didn’t make sense in the moment or that won’t make sense upon a second watch, but that’s what I got for the first go-around.
If I was Olivia
In my opinion, this movie could have been made much better in two ways. Both come down to pacing.
Option 1: End the movie immediately after Alice is put back in the simulation.
I was convinced this was where the movie was going to end while watching. It would’ve made so, so much sense to have the last frame be Jack helping her out of the car since one of the first scenes we saw in the movie was Jack getting in his car to leave for work and Alice telling him goodbye.
You could’ve also spent more time in the middle of the movie with the Margaret stuff and then also in the explanation of how Jack found the Victory Project and got Alice into it.
Also, I think ending the movie here could’ve made it a way stronger thriller as opposed to just a psychological drama or whatever we want to call it. I would’ve felt so different leaving the theater if I didn’t know what happened to Alice.
Option 2: Move the ending up, and spend more time with Alice after she’s been put back in.
This would’ve taken more reworking of the script and would have done something entirely else to the film than Option 1, but I think it could have worked.
If you cut out some of the earlier, somewhat frivolous party scenes (or at least trim them) the ballet and random wives talking scenes, you can have the movie’s reveal happen more toward the middle. Then, once Alice is put back into the simulation, it doesn’t have to be a race to get her out.
There also would’ve been a different sort of shock-value to seeing what happened when Alice returned to the real-world, especially considering the original script having her coming out into the 2050s.
My in-movie theory
Okay, just for fun, here’s what I thought the Victory Project was while watching the movie and then we’ll be done.
For starters, I thought the women were just being drugged, especially since there were so many explicit shots of food throughout the movie and Alice had the whole speech about the food all coming from Frank. So I wasn’t thinking in the metaverse realm at all.
I also thought the movie was potentially set in an apocalyptic future (or honestly just a different past timeline?) and the men were developing nuclear bombs or some sort of megaweapon. The whole setting just reminded me of Nuke Town in Black Ops: Zombies II and also the nuclear testing town in one of the Indiana Jones movies. And the 50s aesthetic???
Like I thought the women were just being sheltered from whatever was going on outside Victory and that’s why everything was so secluded and it seemed like the men were working in a bunker of some sort and there were earthquakes. Really thought I was on to something.