Film Review: Don’t Worry Darling is a flawed but fascinating satire on male inadequacy

Harry Styles has been hammered for his limited emotional range, but given that his character is a man with a limited emotional range, it’s hard to know whether Styles is out of his depth or playing a cleverly understated game

Don't Worry Darling film 2022

★★★★☆

If it seems a little too good to be true then it very probably is, as Alice (Florence Pugh) discovers in Don’t Worry Darling (16s), which opens in a Norman Rockwell idyll of 1950s American suburbia, a sun-baked paradise of palm trees, swimming pools and boozy dinner parties. 

Life should be wonderful for Alice, and not least because she’s married to dreamboat Jack (Harry Styles), but something doesn’t seem quite right. Is it possible that a life can be too perfect? 

Florence Pugh is in superb form here as Alice evolves from an unquestioning Stepford Wife into a brilliantly brittle ball of rage

Director Olivia Wilde follows up her superb debut Booksmart (2019) with a provocative psychological thriller in which the independently minded Alice finds herself patronised and shunned when she starts asking questions about the nature of the Victory Project, a kind of gated community on a grand scale led by the charismatic visionary Frank (Chris Pine). 

Determined to buttress his community against ‘the merciless enemy of chaos’, Frank is an old-school patriarch who celebrates ‘beauty in control’, a philosophy that has much to recommend it unless, like Alice, you come to the conclusion that you’re the beauty being controlled. 

Gemma Chan, Harry Styles, Sydney Chandler, director Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Florence Pugh and Nick Kroll attend the "Don't Worry Darling" red carpet at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 05, 2022 in Venice, Italy. Picture: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Florence Pugh is in superb form here as Alice evolves from an unquestioning Stepford Wife into a brilliantly brittle ball of rage, and she gets strong support from Olivia Wilde, who co-stars as Alice’s best friend Bunny. There is no sign here of the rumoured on-set strife between Wilde and Pugh as a result of the director’s romantic relationship with Styles. 

For his part, Styles has been hammered for his limited emotional range, but given that his character is a man with a limited emotional range (Jack seems to only have two gears, smugly complacent and frustrated rage), it’s hard to know whether Styles is out of his depth or playing a cleverly understated game. 

Either way, Don’t Worry Darling is a flawed but fascinating satire on male inadequacy

(cinema release)