Don’t Worry Darling
The Victory Project, an oasis of palm trees nestled between the desert and the mountains populated by an enclave of a team of dedicated scientists and engineers who every morning kiss their wives and children goodbye to focus their energies on developing “progressive materials” of which they are not allowed to speak, returning at sunset to their clean and tidy homes for gourmet meals and the endless circuit of cocktail parties.
Margaret having suffered a breakdown during which she walked into the dangerous wastes of the desert with her now-missing son, she has become a disharmony in the cul-de-sac which is hidden behind drawn curtains, leading her newlywed friend Alice Chambers to question the apparent perfection of their structured lives and the intentions of Frank, the revered guru who stands at the centre of Victory expecting absolute unswerving loyalty and total discretion.
Like The Stepford Wives which it resembles in more than its couture dressed and manicured retro-perfection, Don’t Worry Darling is that rarest thing, a horror of creeping menace told almost entirely in broad daylight where wide smiles sit on faces with dead eyes, Florence Pugh’s Alice beginning to see the cracks in the façade and unsure whether it is she or the world which is unravelling.
Directed by Olivia Wilde who also appears as Bunny, Alice’s neighbour whose fear of upsetting the status quo makes it apparent that she is at least partially aware all is not as it should be, the Victory Project is an exercise in control of mind and body, the husbands revelling in the reflected glory of their master who aims to remake the world while their wives are bound to routine, cooking, cleaning, gardening, gossiping.
Her husband Jack (Harry Styles) far from domesticated and in thrall to Frank (Chris Pine), sinister and assured spider at the centre of the web, Alice is suffocated by the conformity and drowning in the nightmares triggered by her own experience in the forbidden desert which marks her as much a pariah as Margaret (KiKi Layne); to the others she becomes a threat, but when Frank says he sees her instead as a challenge she accepts perhaps too eagerly.
Don’t Worry Darling undeniably derivative yet seeming as fresh as a summer lawn, the script by Katie Silberman from a story by Carey and Shane Van Dyke and Wilde’s direction of the eerie desert with mountaintop monuments of modernity sets Phase IV under a Vanilla Sky with a dash of The Great Gatsby as staged by Busby Berkeley, Alice the rogue element in Frank’s experiment of enforced domesticity and gender roles as she refuses to be contained by the rules of her community or her marriage even if it courts with disaster.
Don’t Worry Darling is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
