Story by Alyssa Crutcher

“Don’t Worry Darling,” directed by Olivia Wilde, is a utopian thriller that is jam-packed with twists, turns, metaphors and symbolism that make it the most suspenseful and exciting movie of 2022. It has people coming back for more to pick out specific, previously-missed clues during the movie that allude to its incredible shock of an end. 

While many critics are saying “Don’t Worry Darling” failed to live up to the hype that was formed around it before release, I think it had just enough suspense and thrill to make a very good film.

For summary, Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) live happily in a town called Victory, where nothing seems to go wrong. The town is small, located in the middle of a desert with a few cookie-cutter houses in one neighborhood. Each house holds one family: a husband and wife, and occasionally children. 

At the same time every day, all of the husbands leave the town to go to work. The wives are unaware of the husband’s real jobs/what they really do at their workplace, Headquarters, a place the wives are never supposed to go to, but wave them goodbye and welcome them home without a second thought. 

After their husbands leave for work, the wives settle in to do daily chores such as cleaning the house, gardening, gossiping and preparing a three-course dinner for their husbands’ arrival.

This is the daily routine for everyone in the town of Victory, and no one seems to question a thing until one wife, Margaret (Kiki Layne), expresses her concerns about the town’s true purpose and the men that run it. 

After venturing off into the surrounding desert with her son one day, Margaret is forced to return to Victory without her son, claiming he was taken from her as a punishment and sending her into a downhill spiral of psychosis. 

The doubts Margaret raises to the other wives cause Alice to falter in her trust of the town, but she attempts to ignore them, until one day she witnesses a plane crash over a mountain while on a trolley ride. 

Alice gets off the trolley, despite the driver’s disagreement, and starts her trek across the desert to check on the plane. Upon doing so, she stumbles across Headquarters. After this, Alice begins to enter a state of psychosis, experiencing hallucinations and flashbacks. 

When Alice tries to get help, the people of Victory, including her husband, Jack, dismiss her as being crazy.

Frank (Chris Pine), the sinister founder and leader of the town, knows the truth about everything. He knows Alice’s doubts are real, but encourages her into them further for his own entertainment and plays it off like she is crazy in front of other townspeople. 

This causes a series of events that lead to the downfall of Alice, Frank and Victory itself. 

What really made the movie suspenseful was the constant allusions to something bigger, something the women didn’t know about. 

During the day, all of the women of Victory would attend a required ballet class. This was no typical ballet class, however, as the women always moved as one. 

The ballet instructor, Shelley (Gemma Chan), who also happened to be Frank’s wife, encouraged synchronicity. “There is beauty in control. There is grace in symmetry,” she chants throughout the class. “We move as one.”

While Shelley was motivating the women to act as one, her husband was just as adamant about unity and symbiosis with the men. 

The town’s motto was “change the world.” Frank would consistently make it known that everyone living in Victory, especially the men, was contributing to a greater good.

The acting in “Don’t Worry Darling” was also a factor that made it so intriguing. Wilde’s choice to cast Harry Styles as Jack was definitely creative. The incredibly famous singer has never really acted this big of a role before, making him a surprising, yet pleasant choice for Jack. In the past, Styles has acted only supporting roles in movies such as “Eternals,” “Dunkirk” and “Miss Americana.” He breezed through his lead part so well, it was hard to remember he became famous for singing, not acting.

Florence Pugh, best known for her role as Dani in “Midsommar,” played Alice flawlessly. Her portrayal of all the emotions Alice experienced — anguish, terror, betrayal, psychosis — were extremely convincing. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Pugh said she loves playing a distressed woman.

And we can’t forget the copious amounts of symbolism in the film. When Jack gets awarded a special ring from Frank at a town gala for getting a promotion, he dances for the crowd in a puppet-like manor with Frank behind him, cheering him on and narrating his dance as if he were the puppeteer. 

There is a scene where Alice is cleaning a large window in her house when suddenly the wall behind her starts moving to push her toward it, trapping her in a very small space and smushing her up against the window. This is symbolic of how suffocating it is living in Victory with no clue as to how she got there, what everyone around her is doing, and why no one believes her concerns. It symbolizes how trapped the women are. 

In one of the ballet classes, Alice sees Margaret on the other side of the big mirror, taking the place of Alice’s reflection. Margaret starts beating her head against the mirror, causing her forehead to bleed and shattering the glass (something only Alice can see, a hallucination). Alice screams and all of the other wives stare at her, shocked, as she runs out of the studio. This could symbolize several things but the most obvious would be to draw a comparison between Alice and Margaret — as they were both catching on to the delusions of Victory — and to symbolize Alice’s need to break free of it. 

While it was easy to get lost in all the chaos of events in the movie, the buildup to the final twist makes it worth it.

All in all, the criticism against the film is dreadfully wrong. “Don’t Worry Darling” took romance, tension, feminism and misogyny and somehow made it all fit into this perfect puzzle. From the very beginning, it took off into an amazing plotline and continued to climax throughout the entirety of the movie. Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings toward Harry Styles or Olivia Wilde, the movie is absolutely worth the watch.