Don’t Worry Darling: A New Generation of Stepford Wives
Life for Alice and Jack Chambers in Victory is simple. They wake up, Alice makes an egg breakfast with toast and coffee, and then sends Jack off to his luxe job at the mysterious headquarters. While the men are away working, the women enjoy the tailored community through activities of ballet, shopping, and lounging by the pool with a cocktail. Underneath the finely manicured lawns, lies a terrifying secret about this picture-perfect community and its charismatic leader that Alice slowly starts to unravel.
The set up of the story in the first two acts as a feminist thriller with hints of sci-fi is intriguing and works. The demise of this film is that it leans heavily into its aesthetic instead of diving below the surface for something meaningful as it rounds out its third act. Olivia Wilde is very focused on the world she has created as she takes ample time to go around different locations of the town. It is more developed than the actual characters.
The third act feels like it doesn’t think the audience is smart enough to figure out what is going on. The twist is clever but it is how it is revealed that is the real problem. The film starts to slow down as Alice realizes something is wrong with her perfect life. It wastes no time to build up her paranoia through hallucinations and puzzled looks. Just like Alice, the story begins to get lost. This is a film all about visual motifs with the circle being a big one that starts to feel repetitive and loses its edge. It likes to dance around the mystery without progressing or adding any climax. No questions are answered for Alice or the audience. The unanswered questions don’t feel like it is left up to the audience’s interpretation but that they were just forgotten along the way.
Olivia Wilde has a strong second outing as a director but doesn’t have the strength to pull this narrative together. In earlier versions of the script, there are only two characters and as the script went through different versions to the final product, it feels like none of the additions added are ever developed. For example, pretty much all of the characters feel one-dimensional and almost act as accessories to the overarching story. Pugh aside from Chris Pine delivers the strongest performance but because she is so vibrant it almost feels out of place.
If this was expected to be a groundbreaking comment on feminism, then it missed the mark by a long shot.