There didn’t seem to be any reason for worry, darling, when it was announced that actress-director Olivia Wilde would follow up her effervescent debut feature “Booksmart” with the 1950s psychological thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” starring Florence Pugh. Having established herself as a bold and unapologetically feminist new filmmaker to watch, Wilde and “Booksmart” collaborator Katie Silberman wrote the screenplay for “Don’t Worry Darling” based on a script by Carey and Shane Van Dyke, which appeared on the 2019 Black List of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood.
But then a major pop star (Harry Styles) replaced a troubled actor (Shia LaBoeuf) on set, and Wilde’s fiance (“Ted Lasso” star Jason Sudeikis) on her arm, and the film became a subject of gossipy speculation, which all climaxed in a gloriously glamorous red carpet cacophony of deliciously frivolous celebrity hubbub at the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month.
“Don’t Worry Darling” is a dizzyingly gorgeous and intoxicating project that combines “The Stepford Wives,” “Gaslight” and the “The Truman Show” into an aesthetically retro riff of modern social commentary. The ideas swirling in “Don’t Worry Darling” are indeed big, but they are also the film’s downfall. Wilde brandishes a sword of Betty Friedan-inspired feminist critique, but loses her tenuous grasp on this unwieldy tool, and rather than delivering an incisive blow to nostalgic misogyny, she slices the whole project to ribbons in front of our eyes, leaving us with a mess of pieces, unclear how to fit them all together.
