I Guess It's Time To Join The DONT WORRY DARLING Discourse

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 I do not have an especially interesting Take™ on Olivia Wilde's new sci-fi thriller "Don't Worry Darling". After months of intense drama involving Ms. Wilde possibly fighting with her female lead and definitely dating her male lead, the end result is a film that I think it basically decent. It's much stronger in the peripheral parts of moviemaking (set design, sound effects) than it is the parts that most people will pay attention to (the script is not great, and neither are most of the actors). It's a mess, but a watchable one.

 The main twist is a good idea for a movie. I'll avoid saying exactly what it is, because the only level the film works on is one of a pure suspense thriller. Instead I'll say that the execution felt lacking, because the film is so deeply uninterested in everyone's backstory. It should be obvious to everyone that Chris Pine is hiding some evil secret. The "why", both why he is evil and why he feels the need to hide secrets, doesn't really get a satisfying answer. He's done away with via an extremely ridiculous and unsatisfying plot development. Is Harry Styles in on the big evil secret? Probably, but once again this script is totally uninterested in the questions of "how" and "why". Olivia Wilde and Gemma Chan both spend most of the film as happy and submissive housewives, and both get a reveal, and in both cases I thought the twist was so absurd that the film would have been better off simply letting them be pawns in Chris Pine's game. It feels like Wilde (and her writer Katie Silberman) chased #girlboss moments to trend on social media, no matter how little sense it made for those two characters to be secretly scheming on their own. Usually this kind of prestige genre film makes critics say "at least the acting was decent" even if the script is a mess, but I thought Styles, Wilde, and Chan were all quite poor. Pine is a lot of fun in the, what, three whole scenes that he gets to play as evil? 

 So what does work here? Olivia Wilde's direction. She conveys the idea of a thriller by totally overwhelming the audience with rapid cuts and rapid-er music cues, which basically do not stop for the first two acts. This is helped immensely by Katie Byron's production design, which nails the delicate balance of making a town look like a 1950s utopia and at the same time feeling artificial in an intangible way. (Matthew Libatique's cinematography is a bit too heavy on lens flares for my liking, but on the whole it's decent enough). Like "Nope" earlier this year, Wilde understands that sounds can conjure more horror than images, and the sound design is truly impressive. I felt attacked by my surroundings in the theater on the same subliminal level that Florence Pugh felt, which I rate as an enthusiastic thumbs up.

 The whole thing feels like a good thriller, which made it easy for me to overlook how few thrills it actually has. I'm genuinely not sure if it's enough to overlook how little sense the whole thing makes in hindsight, and I don't think I enjoyed myself enough to watch it again. That's the problem with a movie that gets most of its value from a twist: sometimes, it falls apart looking back on earlier events knowing what the twist is. The hostile way Wilde acts towards Pugh in the bathroom and the nonchalant manner in which she treats her kids makes little sense knowing where it's all going, and the same goes for the plane crash that acts as the film's inciting incident and never gets any explanation of "what" happened there, much less the "why" and "how". Let's call this the 3/5 that I'm most likely to say was actually a bad movie a few months from now.

⭐⭐⭐

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