Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) So much has been written about the making of actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (Celebrity drama! CELEBRITY DRAMA!) that it’s forgivable to forget that there is actually a movie to review in the middle of the tabloid gossip. But as it turns out, maybe there is a link between content and drama: the film goes so out of its way to portray a gendered dystopia in which all men are terrible that it’s hard to avoid noticing how Wilde’s frequent public declarations about the utopia of female-led filmmaking have turned out to be more complicated than anticipated. (Just to come clean on my reactionary bent: The greater inclusivity of movie directors is one of the best things that has happened to Hollywood in the past decade, but holy potatoes am I tired of the cheap grandstanding male-bashing.)  Considering my muted reaction to the overall result, it’s good that I actually have some very nice things to say about Wilde-the-director—her sense of style is not bad (and this is a project that allows her to stretch beyond the straightforward Booksmart): Berkeleyesque kaleidoscopes have seldom felt more foreboding. The bright setting of much of the film is rendered with pop, and she can effectively wring a sense of mystery and suspense out of the script’s set-pieces. This being said: Why did she have to pick such a terrible script? A very, very long build-up is foreboding in its certitude that the men are up to no good, but when the revelations drop, they make the film feel even dumber than it already is. The dystopia-behind-the-utopia is so fundamentally untenable that it defies even the simplest questions—the score-counting against men becomes even cheaper at that point, and nearly drowns the film along with it. Look—If you want to go Stepford Wives on the parallels between patriarchy and exploitative power structures, go wild: but make sure the genre material works before trying to build an allegory on top of it. Otherwise, well, we’re back to filmmaking basics: Chris Pine is very good as a cult leader (and so is Wilde!), while Harry Styles is surprisingly dull in a role that feels increasingly empty. Florence Pugh is not bad, it’s a fun surprise to see Dita van Teese play herself, while both Kiki Layne and Gemma Chan are underused. Some of the enigmatic sequences of Don’t Worry Darling, unfortunately, have no payoffs by the time the credits roll, and that further contributes to the feeling of the film being a hollow gesture. It’s going to be interesting to see Wilde’s next project, though—if nothing else, she once again has something to prove.