Don’t Worry Darling Is Smooth, Competent, and Tedious

Arriving on the Venice Movie Pageant on a quickly rising tidal wave of poisonous buzz, Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Fear Darling is neither as dangerous as some are clearly hoping it will likely be, nor pretty much as good because it most likely must be to beat the general public relations nightmare its press rollout has turn out to be. Listening to all of the rumors of a troubled set, of actors falling out with the director, one may need anticipated a cacophonous, cobbled-together disaster. If solely. The movie is clean, competent, (largely) well-acted, and merely tedious.

Set in a fastidiously manicured, midcentury suburban utopia positioned smack in the course of a desert, Darling explores the rising self-awareness of a younger housewife, Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh), whose doting husband Jack (Harry Types) units off each morning with all the opposite males to a high secret job the place he works with what’s referred to solely as “progressive supplies.” There are overtones right here of the “secret cities” of the Manhattan Venture, the pre-fab residential communities constructed by the U.S. army through the growth of the atom bomb. The Chambers’ neighborhood is a part of one thing known as “the Victory Venture,” the place every thing is cleanly coordinated and regimented. The place males are women and men are ladies, the place steaks and cocktails are ready when hubby will get residence, and the place the characters are rewarded with a number of joyful children and/or a number of nice intercourse.

Clearly, one thing is deeply improper right here. The wives all wave their fingers in unison at their husbands. The boys drive off in gleaming, uniform, multi-colored automobiles into the desert. The ladies go to bounce courses the place they’re instructed, “There’s magnificence in management. There’s grace in symmetry.” On the radio, the voice of Frank (Chris Pine), the Victory Venture’s chief, gives forcefully said bromides resembling “You might be worthy of the life you’ve chosen.”  Later, he’ll discuss how the enemy of progress is chaos. On the Venice press convention for the movie, Wilde and her solid talked about how regardless of the interval trappings of the film, it’s actually about right now. “The individuals we’re taking part in have been actual individuals in a world very a lot our personal,” Pine mentioned. He didn’t must say it. The film isn’t precisely refined on this level.

So, the place does a narrative like this go, when it’s apparent proper from the get-go that there’s something deeply twisted occurring below its surfaces? Cinema has already given us two variations of The Stepford Wives, to not point out motion pictures like Suburbicon and Blue Velvet and Pleasantville and any variety of different movies in regards to the corrosive underbelly of nice, old school domesticity. (There are a number of different reference factors one might cite for Don’t Fear Darling, however they might represent spoilers.) Motion pictures about utopias that develop into dystopias both must discover a solution to make their utopias initially compelling, or get issues rolling in such dramatic or deranged style that we are able to’t assist however be riveted by the characters’ journeys of discovery.

Don’t Fear Darling, alas, does none of these items. It merely asks us to observe as Alice slowly realizes that one thing creepy lurks throughout the Victory Venture, and that may get boring and repetitive after some time. Our protagonist’s rising consciousness comes by way of black-and-white visions of dancing ladies, in addition to concern for her next-door neighbor and once-close buddy, Margaret (KiKi Layne), whom we be taught misplaced her son out within the desert and hasn’t been the identical since. Sooner or later, whereas driving the Victory trolley that carries the wives to their every day appointments, Alice sees a airplane falling from the sky behind a mountain. She tells the motive force and needs to go assist. “I don’t go that manner,” he says, tensely. “That’s not my route.” This may need been a surprising second, however the group of Victory is so oppressively ordered and exact that it comes as little shock to us. So, we watch and bide our time as Alice expresses her shock, then units off into the desert on her personal. It’s by no means enjoyable when the viewers is so many steps forward of the characters.

The film, in its personal manner, capabilities just like the city of Victory itself. As a director, Wilde has a very good eye, and the movie’s many scenes of regimented grace have a pleasant visible pop. In her directorial debut, Booksmart, she used the story’s episodic construction to experiment with type and toss concepts on the display screen; the movie made a advantage out of chaos. Don’t Fear Darling makes a advantage out of orderliness, however that may solely go to date. We maintain ready for the film to shock us, to shock us. We maintain ready for the chaos.

Inside this framework, Pugh does nervousness and terror properly, and he or she makes Alice’s gathering anxiousness as convincing as it may be, even when the script fails to offer her all that many attention-grabbing issues to do. As Bunny, Alice’s shut buddy and wise-cracking, cocktail-guzzling den mom to the clique of Victory wives, Wilde herself appears to be having plenty of enjoyable. Pine makes for a uniquely charismatic proto-fascist cult chief; the movie receives a welcome jolt of power at any time when he’s onscreen. The weak hyperlink, sadly, is Types, who is just not with out expertise, however who fails to offer Jack the dimensionality or interior battle that the character clearly wants, particularly in gentle of the place the film finally goes.

About that: This type of image has been achieved sufficient occasions that at this level there are a number of off-the-rack explanations for what could be occurring. Our minds have been fucked sufficient occasions that the trendy mindfuck film has misplaced a lot of its energy to shock, particularly when it pronounces from its opening frames that it will likely be a mindfuck film. Finally, Don’t Fear Darling goes for a reasonably acquainted twist — a revelation that can probably have already flitted throughout many viewers’ minds as they watched the film. However the clarification weirdly winds up being one of many strengths of the movie, as a result of Wilde brings to it sufficient fascinating grisliness that the twist successfully reframes most of what’s come earlier than. In different phrases, it brings that little bit of chaos the film has been sorely lacking. Is it sufficient? Most likely not. But it surely’s not a complete failure, both.