Don't Worry Darling

Can Florence Pugh make anything worth watching? This latest effort from Olivia Wilde, which screened at Venice, puts that to the test. Essentially an update of The Stepford Wives with none of the meatiness of the original or camp joie-de-vivre of the 2004 remake, it has three credited writers and gives the distinct impression of having been assembled by a committee.

Pugh plays Alice, a young woman who has recently moved to the ‘experimental community’ of Victory with husband Jack (Harry Styles – the role was originally supposed to go to Shia LaBoeuf, so there’s that). Whilst he goes out to work five days a week, she cheerily cleans their house and chats to her neighbours, all women of a similar age with bright smiles and pretty dresses and never a hair out of place. They are not quite the demure dames of Stepford. They talk about sex, which Alice and Jack are notorious for having a lot of, and they’re not afraid to display some intelligence, at least to one another. There are certain rules, however, by which the community obliges them to live. They don’t ask the men about their work – that’s classified – and they don’t seek to stray beyond the boundaries of the town.

One day, when riding the local tram, Alice sees a light aircraft spiralling down over a hill on the horizon. Shocked that nobody else is responding to the situation and worried that the pilot or passengers may need help, she hikes out there herself. A very strange experience follows, and after that she can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. Her relationship with Jack begins to deteriorate as he worries that her behaviour could jeopardise his standing with his boss, community leader Frank (Chris Pine), and she finds herself facing an increasing amount of gaslighting, whilst still more worrying things happen to one of her friends.

Pugh handles the paranoia of it all well and manages to flesh out her character so that she feels like a real person despite the flimsiness of the story. It’s an uphill struggle, however, as the plotting is completely incoherent and balanced atop a trembling tower of absurdities. Every additional leyer of explanation renders it more precarious. It fails to make sense at the most fundamental economic or sociological level: everything about it could be done more easily and more productively without the need to put people like Alice in this situation. The only way it can make any sense is as a fantasy of control, but it is then so ludicrously expensive, difficult to sustain and inherently specific that it’s hard to imagine anyone would buy in, let alone the men we’re presented with.

America has no shortage of obscure cults in the desert set up by wealthy men who like to take advantage of women, and there is no shortage of documentaries about them, so what exactly this film is supposed to add is a mystery. Its only selling point is its youthful cast, all of whose members, Pugh aside, are showcased at their blandest. In appealing to the youth market, it would seem to be banking on the idea that young people don’t watch old films. The problem is that one doesn’t need to be familiar with what it’s ripping off to observe that it has no substance of its own.