It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a film that’s been swallowed whole by its own production drama. Paws Of Fury kinda had that same result, but the drama there was mainly background noise that you’d have to dig for. Don’t Worry Darling, on the other hand? It has been one of, if not the, most talked-about film of the year, and not even for anything do with the film’s content. Hell, the behind-the-scenes drama and marketing gaffs for this could (and has elsewhere) make for its own write-up.
But rather than just fill this review with references to #Spitgate, or how this movie feels like a movie, or hypothesising how much worse this could’ve been if Shia LaBeouf was still in it… well, outside of just mentioning them then, that’s not what I’ll be doing. Partly because, even at its most talked-about, all of this just isn’t that interesting to me (I’m not here for the gossip, I’m here for the movie), but mainly because this film is such a… bizarre creation all on its own that there’s already enough material here.
I really like how this film looks, right out of the gate. I’m a sucker for psychological cinema, and this certainly scratched that itch. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography presents a lot of eye-catching imagery, and when combined with Affonso Gonรงalves’ editing, it has this tangible repressed memory effect, with these sudden flashes of images that add quite a bit to the ‘something’s not quite right’ atmosphere of the main setting. Speaking of the setting, the ‘50s retro production design is well-done, even managing to make the obvious dystopia look inviting initially, and the needle drops work quite nicely. Especially when put together with John Powell’s roar of a soundtrack.
The acting in this is… mostly good. Florence Pugh is old hat at being the strong woman in a world made for dickheads, and as the focal point character, she devours every morsel the script gives her. Opposite her, Harry Styles… man… I kinda feel bad for him, because he’s clearly trying here, but he isn’t nearly flexible enough to work with all the different directions his character takes. In the more romantic scenes, his chemistry with Pugh is fantastic (and him being introduced as an unselfish lover certainly helps), but as his character becomes more entrenched in Victory’s cultish ways, his attempts at ACTING! put a damper on the emotional heights being reached for. Olivia Wilde herself delivering one of her better recent performances eases things a bit, thankfully.
Then there’s the story and the world it’s set in within Victory, and… well, it kinda works, but it had an uphill struggle to get me to engage with it to begin with. As embodied by Chris Pine as Frank, a lot of what the film is commenting on has to do with patriarchal fantasies about how the world, and the people in it, are ‘supposed’ to be. Chaos is the enemy, reject modernity, offer comfort to disaffected white men by playing into their worst impulses; it’s all very Jordan Peterson, to the point where Wilde saying as much and Peterson’s own reaction to that became part of the marketing drama.
And while it’s all certainly accurate, pointing out more of the fundamentally unhealthy attitudes that only end up making men collectively look bad… to be honest, just about anything to do with Peterson slides right off of my brain. Apart from him being the common link between so many things I hate about the Manosphere ‘public intellectual’ racket, I have zero interest in his philosophies, even on a perverse ‘how do people think like this?’ level. Actually, that doesn’t go far enough; I don’t even like hearing the rebuttals to the man’s ideas, because it still involves having to hear the words of someone who I could not even be paid to give a shit about.
But that’s not really my issue with all this. After all, I may be rather apathetic about the real-life inspiration for the film’s bigger targets, but the ideas being presented are still worth dissecting and highlighting for the garbage they are. No, my issue comes with how the film actualises its commentary, primarily through the world-building on display. I find it funny that this film first started catching buzz off the basis of its script, a Blacklist alumni drawn up by Carey and Shane Van Dyke of The Silence and Asylum mockbuster fame(?), and yet it apparently got quite the rewrite by Katie Silberman, who previously worked with Wilde on Booksmart.
It certainly still feels like something the Van Dykes cooked up, with its glaringly derivative composition (along with Stepford Wives, there’s quite a bit of Charlie Brooker and Jordan Peele in this), but even familiarity could still be serviceable. It’s more that, when the big reveal for what Victory actually is makes itself known (which, even under the circumstances, I won’t be spoiling here), it fails to make sense of a lot of the narrative build-up or the imagery provided. The black-and-white footage of dancing girls, the blood droplet, the mirrors; not of that leads into an adequate rationale for why they’re being shown, or what they actually add to the story with their inclusion aside from atmosphere.
This isn’t helped by how, on top of being rather predictable as a narrative, it is really stretched-out. The pacing has a lot of the same problems as A Cure For Wellness, where the personal revelation for the main character that things indeed aren’t what they seem is done both too early-on and ends up being repeated until it gets rather tedious. Same goes for the larger arc for Pugh’s Alice and her questioning of life in Victory, with a lot of unnatural dialogue that only ends up adding to the disconnect between the foreshadowing and what it’s setting up.
Actually, ‘disconnected’ is the best way to describe this whole film. While I can appreciate the film craft on offer, and there’s certainly potential in the modernisation of its own influences, its strongest elements are at odds with the big plot developments they’re apparently in service to. If I had to guess, I’d say that Silberman’s rewriting did a number on the progression of the original script, resulting in a lot of moments that set up things that no longer happen on-screen. I don’t normally mind being able to predict plot twists ahead of time, as that usually just means that the film is putting in the effort to set them up ahead of time, but here, it makes for a more unwelcome version of that same misdirecting intent. It’s not nearly as bad as its publicity SNAFU status may indicate, but that’s because it’s a lot more disappointing than that.
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