There’s a lot of juicy drama existing outside of Don’t Worry Darling, from on-set romances, custody papers, PR gaffes, to even a rumored hawked loogie. It’s been one of the more chaotically enjoyable hype cycles in recent memory—one that’s only amped up anticipation for the movie itself.
It’s too bad that the movie is 10,000-percent less fun than any of the mess leading up to it. Don’t Worry Darling is a slog, saved only by Florence “Miss Flo” Pugh’s performance. Her Alice is a woman dealing with simmering (and incredibly believable) rage and distrust for what’s going on around her. She’s what we in the biz call an audience avatar, a character we can relate to. But that relatability only goes so far—because the movie takes Alice, and us, on a painfully absurd ride.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for Don’t Worry Darling.)
Don’t Worry Darling positions itself as a sci fi-tinged 1950s-set thriller. Keyword “sci fi.” If you think that everything is not as it seems, you’re right! This is a movie with a big twist, and that big twist has to do with, yes, avatars. And a podcast. And redpilled Redditors-turned-incel droogs. And Harry Styles’ hair (and, to a lesser degree, accent). Oh, and some incredibly awful ethics and low-key domestic abuse.
Buckle up—unlike any of the characters in this movie, despite the mad-dash car chase during its big climax. Because Don’t Worry Darling’s end-game reveal is a doozy.
The set-up: Alice and her husband, Jack (Harry “Can’t Act” Styles), are residents of a quiet suburb outside of the desert, somewhere on the West Coast. It appears to be sometime in the ’50s, based on all the updos, floral prints, pearl necklaces, and record players blasting old standards. All day long, the women do nothing but listen to music, watch TV, clean, gossip, and go to ballet class.
Jack—just like all the husbands in town—works for some mysterious organization called the Victory Project. Frank (Chris Pine) is the Victory Project’s very handsome, very suspicious leader. Alice is the only one to suspect that Frank’s up to no good, even though he’s the reason that the men disappear every day to go work on the Victory Project’s “progressive materials”—and he’s the one who forbids them to tell their wives what that means.
Alice’s eyes open after a friend of hers, Margaret (KiKi Layne), calls to warn her that things aren’t right in their quiet town. Alice tries to brush off the call, but not long after that, she sees Margaret kill herself by jumping off her roof. All is truly not well, and Alice knows it. None of the men in charge—it’s obviously all men—can stand for that, so the gaslighting commences.
The gaslighting gets so bad that Alice is eventually forced to undergo a medical procedure, in order to rid her of paranoia. This comes after she confronts Frank, Jack, and her ignorant neighbors about what’s going on: The Victory Project is up to no good, keeping women in the dark and silencing them if they get close to discovering what’s really going on at their remote headquarters. But Frank actually seems to be truly horny for Alice’s edging toward the truth of what he and the men are doing, taunting her to dig for clues.
But Alice, and the viewer, doesn’t actually understand what is happening until she is strapped to a table about to have her mind wiped of all she knows in order to suppress her rebellion. And this is where things get incredibly, incredibly nonsensical.
We are transported into Alice’s memories before they’re wiped out. It turns out that before they joined the Victory Project, Alice and Jack were a bickering, modern-day married couple. Jack lost his job, which Alice said was fine—she’s a surgeon, and she’s down to take on more 30-hour shifts in the operating room. Jack could take the time he needed to find another job.
Instead, he sat at home all day on the computer, getting angry with Alice for not coming home for dinner every night. His masculinity under threat, he started spending more time on the internet, listening to a creepy, cultish podcast hosted by none other than Frank.
Jack was indoctrinated by Frank through his toxic sermons about making the ideal society, one in which men are dominant and women are subservient. Not only did Frank preach these ideas, he practiced them: Somehow, this podcast host had created a highly detailed simulation of his dream world, which men like Jack could sign up to live within.
Jack obviously signed up for the simulation, which is called the Victory Project. The greasy-haired, bespectacled nerd was promised the chance to become who he really wanted to be: a suave Brit (hm, wonder why?) instead of a dowdy American, whose wife would stay home and let him be the breadwinner for once. All Jack needed to do was not tell Alice about any of this, lest she ruin his fun. Then he could then sedate her and hook her up to the goggle-type device that grants access to the Victory Project.
There is one catch. Jack has to come out of the simulation for eight hours every day—that’s when the men were going to “work”—to make sure that Alice was still connected to the headset and also, like, alive? Jack would also go do some unseen work in order to keep paying for access to the Victory Project. Alice stays blissfully ignorant of all of this, drinking and gabbing in the sim all day long, every day, forever.
This, my friends, is why the metaverse is a bad idea.
The convoluted explanation for the vague creepiness of Don’t Worry Darling’s first two acts brings more questions than answers. How has no one rescued important surgeon Alice from her imprisonment yet? What kind of work does Jack do to make money? Are the pregnant women in the simulation actually pregnant? Why and how is Frank supporting this very intricately designed cult? Is he still making the podcast while he’s hanging out in the virtual world? Where did that mysterious plane that crashed in the desert, causing Alice to start investigating everything in the first place, come from? Why does the ground violently shake sometimes?
I could go on and on and on. Before the movie can even begin to contend with these plot holes, Jack and Frank die—Alice beats Jack to death with some glass as he tries to subdue her; Frank’s creepy wife (Gemma Chan) randomly stabs him as he realizes that Alice is blowing up his whole life’s work. And if you die in the simulation, you die in real life.
These are the big takeaways from Don’t Worry Darling’s mind-numbing twist, in short: Ra ra, feminism. Boo, toxic masculinity. Technology is bad. The end!
