“Whose world is this? Ours!” So chant the men of Don’t Worry Darling in one key moment that speaks to the core of Olivia Wilde’s second film as director.
Her movie is yet another rejoinder at the promise of progress, suggesting equality—especially among the sexes—is not as keenly rendered as we might like to think in the early 21st century. There are lots of anxieties about this lately – Alex Garland’s Men, for example, throwing a traumatised woman into a remote country space filled with haunting, mythical examples of male control and toxicity; or imminently, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, adapting Joyce Carol Oates’ searing, tragic examination of Marilyn Monroe’s life of abuse after abuse by entitled, toxic males, and the psychological complexes that come from it.
Wilde, working from a script by Katie Silberman that stemmed from the esteemed ‘Black List’, presents these issues less through Pagan horror or grotesque celebrity but rather via the ghoulish lens of not just psychological or psychosexual thriller but as conspiratorial mystery within a quasi-fascist utopia; a perfect world of historical American values that never truly existed based on order, symmetry and defined, accepted gender roles. Don’t Worry Darling fears we remain trapped in this dark fantasy, that our ‘wokeness’ disguises a terrifying somnambulism encasing modern women.
It is a film driven by our modern discourse yet at once it has, off screen, been eaten alive by it. On screen, it struggles to live up to the powerful promise of the concept, becoming lost in derivative approaches.
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