Near the end of last weekend’s most popular theatrical release, “Don’t Worry Darling,” the perfect 1950s homemaker played by Florence Pugh finally begins to piece together the insidious puzzle of her life. She’s living inside the confines of her marriage to a rising young executive (Harry Styles) as part of the larger, fastidiously planned desert community of Victory, California, a company town with a cryptic corporate mission.
We know something’s off from the beginning. Screenwriter Katie Silberman, who rewrote an existing script by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s grandsons), drops clues hither and yon and then beyond yon. Why is that plane in the sky “glitching” in a very non-’50s way, as if part of some sort of computer simulation? Why are the eggs in Alice’s wonderland of a midcentury modern kitchen mere empty shells, like wee metaphors of her existence?
After Alice comes upon the forbidden company headquarters in the mountains, she slips into a looking glass — right through the literal glass window of the building, where the peculiar visions and memories plaguing her daily life feel fully formed, and “real.” Then, following nearly two hours of movie trying to make sustainable sense of an hour’s worth of plot, she realizes the nightmarish reality of her situation.
