Warning: Spoilers Ahead

By Maia Zasler

Raisinets and buttered popcorn in hand, I made my way through the dimly lit doorway of the Regal Short Pump Theater Complex, stopping to look at the illuminated sign displaying Don’t Worry Darling. In spite of what I’d heard from tabloid coverage of the film leading up to its release, I tried to watch it with an open mind. It did, in fact, “feel like a movie… like, you know, go-to-the-theater-film movie.” Although, for most of that movie, I was quite confused. Its much-anticipated metaphor fell flat. Events transpired that did not further the plot or fit into the already slow character development. No incredible Florence Pugh performance could have saved the movie’s convoluted storyline. 

Alice (Pugh) and her husband Jack (Styles). Photo credit: Warner Bros. Studios

If you have not seen Don’t Worry Darling, you don’t really need to (worry, darling). Let’s set the scene: Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) Chambers are married and live in a 1950s town owned and operated by the elusive Victory Project. Viewers watch as Alice assumes traditional, domestic roles throughout her day while Jack is off at work for Victory (with a non-descript job title of “technical engineer”). When their husbands are away, the women enjoy free credit spending, drinks by a sunlit pool, and the general fruits of a seemingly perfect paradise. 

The one rule in the Victory community is that residents must remain within its borders. When Alice is out one day, spending time alone on the trolley that runs through all of Victory, she watches as a plane goes down into the desert mountains in the distance. Rightfully concerned, she compels the trolley driver to stop along his route and join her in a rescue mission. The driver refuses, and so Alice begins the long, hot, uphill trek alone. 

Alice does not find the plane, nor the person who would have been operating it. Instead, she stumbles across a glowing, ovular structure at the end of a winding road, atop the mountain’s summit. She is compelled to touch it, with her arms out and her eyes closed, Alice sees a disturbing array of images the moment her hands make contact with the form in front of her.

The scene quickly shifts to Alice waking up in her home. The afternoon has come and gone. Alice walks out of her dark bedroom to find her husband preparing dinner. Jack claims that when he arrived home, Alice was asleep. 

This is when the film begins to take a turn, revealing a more sinister plot under the bright cinematography that illustrates the Victory community. While cleaning windows, Alice becomes suffocated as the glass closes in on her. While sitting by the pool, Alice finds herself being pulled under the water, drowning. While attending a ballet class, Alice’s reflection in the mirror is of one her friends, Margaret, who eventually violently slams her head against the other side.

The film starts to piece together much of the disturbing imagery, culminating in a several-minutes long sequence of a lobotomized Alice catching glimpses of her life in the real world. Victory is a simulation: an imaginary world, created by a man named Frank (Chris Pine), where men opt to live and the women have no choice. 

Alice and Bunny (Wilde) watching as their husbands leave for work. Photo credit: Warner Bros./Everett Collection.

Director and co-star Olivia Wilde followed the familiar storyline of a woman discovering the trauma and problems with a domesticated lifestyle. Elle Mitchell (‘25) believes that “Don’t Worry Darling represents something beyond the stereotypes of men and women. It showcased how a woman could feel trapped mentally and physically in their place in society.” I can appreciate the message the movie was trying to convey, and I enjoyed watching it. However, as it began to conclude, that illusion of enjoyment fell apart.

There were many plot holes and failures to enrich the storyline. All the men in Victory are identical, but no woman is the same. Their stories are not complete, and that brings up problems with Wilde’s attempted feminist liberation message of the film. Bunny (also played by Olivia Wilde), one of Alice’s friends, reveals that she opted to live in the Victory simulation, choosing to deny reality in order to live with imaginary versions of her two late children. How does that serve the metaphor?

The end of the film, with its revelation of Frank and Jack as two villains, also fell flat. Frank is killed by his wife (Gemma Chan). Why? There was no villain origin story, nor development of Chan’s character. Katie Cullen (‘24) said that “the movie had a really mind-twisting and interesting plot, but I left the theater feeling pretty unsatisfied after the ending.”

These are just a few examples of storyline inconsistencies and plot holes. To explain the unsatisfactory ending, I sought answers from Hugh Cafritz (‘22), an undergraduate film and television major at New York University. He boldly stated that “the problem with the movie began back when it was written.” There were three credited writers (Kate Silberman, Carey Van Dyke, and Shane Van Dyke). This is not uncommon in the film industry; however, the results are particularly felt in Don’t Worry Darling. There are three threads that are somewhat abruptly shoved together in two hours. There is Bunny, the only woman who opted to be in Victory. There is Frank, a secondary antagonist to Jack. Finally, there is the relationship between Alice and Jack, which the movie primarily focuses on. 

Don’t Worry Darling is a psycho-thriller. However, I think it fell short in its execution and attempt at creating a feminist film. Setting the plot holes aside, my primary issue is that the storyline relied on an outdated misinterpretation of feminism. It portrays the home and a more domesticated lifestyle as a prison (quite literally, as Pugh is constrained against a bed, forced to stay in Victory against her will). I would have liked to see the movie do something more interesting with the message, like pursuing the Bunny storyline, which portrayed a woman who made a choice to deny reality and live in an imaginary community, or maybe exploring what made Frank create a world for fellow misogynists to thrive. The star-studded cast did their best, but in the end, the plot missed the mark.

Featured image courtesy of Warner Bros. Studios.