Don't Worry Darling

Year:	2022
Country:	USA
Language:	English
Genre:	Mystery, Thriller
IMDB:	IMDB Page
Rating:	Rate
Collection:	Seen It Wishlist
Community:	4 Have Seen


Director	Olivia Wilde
Selected Cast	Florence Pugh as Alice
	Harry Styles as Jack
	Chris Pine as Frank
	Olivia Wilde as Bunny
	KiKi Layne as Margaret
Producer	Olivia Wilde
	Katie Silberman
	Miri Yoon
	Roy Lee
Writer	Katie Silberman
Soundtrack	John Powell

Notes

A 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community begins to worry that his glamorous company could be hiding disturbing secrets.

Images

Comments and Reviews


zabadak 5th Nov 2022		Review WhyNow review :read: ✔︎ Helpful Review?



zabadak 11th Oct 2022		Article from The Independent, Monday 26 September 2022 :read: Don’t Worry Darling speaks to – but misunderstands – the horrors of the ‘tradwife’ phenomenon Few have talked about the actual themes of Olivia Wilde’s buzzed-about new film, distracted instead by rumours of off-camera feuds. But it’s in (flawed) conversation with a baffling lifestyle trend that calls on women to be submissive and ‘traditional’, writes Eloise Hendy. It’s difficult to remember a time before I knew about Don’t Worry Darling. It feels like it has always existed; like it was here before everyone I know was born; like it is more ancient than time itself. And yet somehow the gossip juggernaut only landed in cinemas this week. In the haze of puzzling behind-the-scenes drama, red carpet antics and endless Twitter clips of Harry Styles trying to out-act Florence Pugh (bless him), one thing has got a bit lost, and that’s the actual film itself. Discussion about it seems to have boiled down to two fairly pedestrian questions: is Don’t Worry Darling any good, and is Harry Styles any good? Surely, though, it’s more interesting to ask what the film is trying to say about the contemporary moment. Because, behind the haze and hype, Olivia Wilde’s movie is about fantasy and the dangers of nostalgia. It’s about feminist backlash and alt-right male anger. It’s about tradwives. A procession of sexy pastel cars pulls out from a cul-de-sac. In the cars: men in suits. In the driveways: a parade of dolls, plumped, cinched and blowing kisses. Eggs and bacon in frying pans, a fresh pot of coffee, a bit of hoovering. Oral sex on the dining table when hubby gets home; an orgasm near the roast beef. How steamy and delicious, what a dream. On the lustrous, high sheen surface, Pugh’s Alice and Styles’s Jack are living the picture-perfect all-American mid-century life. In the desert enclave town of Victory, they are – according to their enigmatic and glossy leader Frank (Chris Pine) – embarking on an exciting and progressive exploit. And so, the women stay home, while the menfolk head off for jobs at the mysterious Victory Project, where they make “progressive materials”. Except, of course, modern filmgoers have consumed enough media by now to know that America’s palm-tree cul-de-sacs always hide uncanny horrors, that suburbia is a suffocating trap (I won’t use the word “Lynchian”, but you all know I’m thinking it). If anyone was in any doubt, Wilde’s direction spells it out for us. In one scene that is sure to delight anyone with an autoerotic asphyxiation fantasy, Alice wraps her whole head in cling film; in another, she is suddenly squeezed between a wall and the glass sliding door she cleans every day, both pressing tighter and tighter in a familiar surreal glitch. Do you get it? Her life is stifling! She’s in a gilded cage! The truth is, Don’t Worry Darling manages to both exceed expectations and fall victim to convention. The first half is luscious and full of potential (thanks largely to Pugh, and Pine’s sinister menace), but the last third slides into cinematic cliché. When the twist comes, as come it must, rather than opening the film up into new, intriguing territories it seems to foreclose all options, forcing the narrative to resolve itself in a typically neat Hollywood fashion. Ultimately, Don’t Worry Darling feels as if The Matrix and The Truman Show shacked up and moved to the upper-class suburb of Stepford, Connecticut. Like these films before it, the horror in Don’t Worry Darling spins around a gulf between fantasy and reality. Here the fantasy stems from nostalgia; from the notion that life was better before. It is undeniable that this kind of nostalgia is rife at the moment. At the same time Don’t Worry Darling was in production – long before Spitgate electrified Twitter – pockets of the internet kept proclaiming the emergence of the tradwife trend. Short for “traditional wife”, the tradwife promotes ultra-orthodox gender roles in relationships, including “feminine submissiveness” and a cook-clean-sew domestic lifestyle. Essentially, the ideal tradwife is barefoot and pregnant and found in the kitchen. Search the hashtag on social media and you’ll see pictures of pies, flowers and babies alongside florid inspirational quotes: “a woman’s place is in the home”, “trying to be a man is a waste of a woman”, even “it’s healthy for a wife to fear her husband”.

Add a Comment or Review about this movie

This Movie: Add Image : Add Video : Add Missing Info : Make Correction : Add to List : Add See Also : Add Tag : Edit Images : Show Image Data : Credits : BBCode