Gone are the days of Florence Pugh filming bright cooking videos out of her BF Zach Braff’s luxurious kitchen. In the latest trailer for the upcoming film Don’t Worry Darling, the actress is stirring up a damn mess in the kitchen as she preps dinner for her new beau, played by Harry Styles. She cracks an egg with her bare hands. She suffocates herself with saran wrap. You know, normal cooking fodder.
There’s a Suspiria-like twist on the sunny disposition of Pugh and her cooking videos in Don’t Worry Darling, one that haunts her character Alice throughout her house and fake neighborhood. She’s deeply in love with her husband Jack (Styles), but he’s entrenched in working for the mysterious Victory Projects.
“I’m so sorry,” Alice says, nearly wrapping herself around Jack’s legs to prevent him from leaving her alone. “I forgot to tell you, but you’re not feeling very well. And the only way to cure it is if we stay home all day, and I tend to you and kiss you and cook for—” she trails off as he bustles out the door.
Work persists. What work is, exactly, we don’t know, and Alice doesn’t know either. Naturally, she’s driven to delirium, imagining the walls are closing in on her, that she’s drowning in a lake, that mirrors are hiding secret women. Unless the Victory Projects (the bonkers housing project/community they live in) actually includes such terrors.
That’s totally possible, considering the founder of the projects (Chris Pine) is a tyrannical monster intent on keeping all chaos outside the walls of their 1950s-esque gated community. Though the aesthetic of the film seems to suggest it takes place decades ago, there’s really no mention of the actual time frame in any description of the film. Is this all some twisted form of time travel back to an age when housewives were plagued with the horrors of the home?
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again (and again): Pugh is giving the performance of a lifetime in this three-minute clip, so it’s likely that she’s about to blow us all out of the water. Not like she hasn’t done that before (*cough* Midsommar *cough* Little Women). She’s bolstered by a handful of equally enticing performances by Chris Pine, Kiki Layne, and Olivia Wilde, the director herself.
Still, after two trailers, it’s difficult to predict exactly what’s happening in Don’t Worry Darling. There are some guesses to be made, sure; that’s what watching the trailer over and over again is for. Littered with easter eggs and thrills, this new Don’t Worry Darling trailer is one of the best of its kind. But I hope we all remember the fizzy trailer for Booksmart, so should we expect any less from Olivia Wilde? Never!
Don’t Worry Darling will premiere in theaters on September 23. For the next two months, we recommend making it to the theater in time to watch the trailers before your movie, so you can watch this again and again on the big screen.
