Ein a beautiful house in the mountains, pool parties with girlfriends and an orgasm every day. That’s all the women need in the neighborhood cosmos Victory, which is equipped with plenty of 1950s retro chic. The catastrophe does not happen for a long time, although the idyll seems strangely unreal from the start – pregnant women drink alcohol, apparently without harming the child, Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) race across the freeway with their eyes closed without an accident to build, they are caught having sex in someone else’s bedroom without having to break off the act.
If it weren’t for these strange flashbacks, these scraps of memory that always overwhelm Alice and that she can’t place. In addition, the title of Olivia Wilde’s second feature film, “Don’t Worry Darling”, is all the more alarming in its over-explicitness. The statement, “Don’t worry, honey” is gaslighting rhetoric as written in the relationship textbook.
Quoting classics like “The Stepford Wives”, “Don’t Worry Darling” is part of a series of current conspiracy thrillers that uncover structural grievances, such as “Get Out” or “Promising Young Woman”. In “Midsommar” Florence Pugh played a woman thrown into a crazy parallel universe who wonders who she can trust anymore.
Even if it’s not quite clear until the end who or what “Don’t Worry Darling” is aimed at, it brings amazing things to the screen in 120 minutes: an unsurpassable dance routine by Harry Styles and a fast-paced chase through the desert. He also finds an oppressive imagery for domestic confinement, for the contradictions in the American suburban dream: crushing eggs with the fist, from which no yolk flows; wrapping your face in plastic wrap until you can’t breathe; the abrupt pause in wiping the windshield, as if seeing a ghost turns out to be a scratch.
The staging of everyday horrors cleverly avoids the danger of getting caught up in the narrow-mindedness of the front yard sprinkler owners, who are obsessed with symmetry and control. Instead, the excessive and orgiastic are effectively fed into the glossy world of appearances. It is celebrated, danced, drunk, loved.
But what is a high that is not real? And what is beyond the borders of Victory that residents are not allowed to leave? – that is the one rule they must abide by in order not to be expelled from paradise.
Too good to be true: The Victory project
Quelle: Merrick Morton Merrick Morton/2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
The aesthetics seem over-the-top computer game-like. The unreal face of Chris Pines, who plays a start-up guru, fits in just as well as Pugh’s radiance, which oscillates between cheeky and graceful, rough and feminine and defies comparison. Other characters hardly leave a lasting impression – including Styles’ portrayed husband, who trudges to work every day only to pounce on his wife as the first thing he gets back, sweeping dinner from the kitchen table in ecstasy.
At the Venice Biennale, the film provided a lasting topic of conversation. Why actor Shia LaBoeuf was really replaced by Styles, when director Wilde started having an affair with her actor Styles, why Pugh suddenly doesn’t say a good word about Wilde, whether she was really paid three times less than Styles, whether Styles spat on Pine at the premiere all of these questions could be dismissed as gossip, but in the context of a film that teaches that nothing is as harmless as the feel-good industry tells us, they may well deserve public attention.
An excerpt from a press interview spread as a much-ridiculed meme on the Internet. Styles then announces, “What I like most about the film is that it feels like a film.” Anyone who sees “Don’t Worry Darling” has an idea of what that might mean. The film makes an effort to finish an ambitious (if not always original) plot, to create lasting images and to report on Hollywood glitz and abyss in a completely unpretentious way. Perhaps Styles’ sentence can also be understood as a plea for cinematic escapism, which would bring him closer to his role than he and we would like. But there is also a third possibility: “film” understood as a thin layer, as a protective film that covers the whole world. Flickers and trembles, menacing and healing.