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Dont worry darling ending1/23/2024 ![]() ![]() What is the Don’t Worry Darling plot twist? Months of this hype, and somehow we’re left with. ![]() Darling made it clear before it was even released that a subversive plot twist was on the horizon. But an audience can only hold their breaths for so long and not expect a) an answer to the mystery of “what’s really going on here?” and b) a payoff for enduring the disquiet of that mystery in the first place. We clench our fists like good little fans when Pugh’s screams pierce the air. Chris Pine, as Victory’s unflappable cultish leader, does a similarly intelligent job of setting the film’s stakes in order. What Darling does well-at least initially-is jack up this tension over time, through breathy sound effects and alarming splashes of color, juxtaposing old-school touchstones like martini glasses and tap-dancing with the modernity of Pugh’s high-velocity performance. The glass walls of her gleaming little house squeeze inward to crunch her delicate cheekbones. At home, she crushes empty eggshells and seals her own face in plastic wrap. Previously content to scrub pans and roast chickens, she’s now bombarded with cracks in Victory’s veneer: She watches a plane crash in the distance as she rides a trolley to run errands. When Margaret eventually commits suicide-with Alice in full view-Alice’s own sense of reality slides off-kilter. ![]() Despite her seemingly happy marriage and gaggle of neighbor girlfriends, she can’t shake an eerie sense of foreboding, which intensifies when another one of the wives, Margaret (an egregiously underused and mistreated Kiki Layne), shows signs of mental collapse. Marketing materials, including teaser trailers, embraced the Stepford Wives comparisons, and the film itself is similarly quick to announce Alice’s misgivings about Victory’s secrets. The audience is meant to believe Jack and his cohort are working on something reminiscent of the Manhattan Project.ĭarling never makes any effort to conceal its central conceit: that something is very, very wrong in Victory. ![]() He and the other men of Victory can’t tell their wives a thing about those strange noises in the distance, or the bizarre earthquakes that rattle the neighborhood at random intervals. They share a picturesque midcentury home that Alice lovingly vacuums, sweeps, and polishes while Jack is away for unexplained business his work for the so-called Victory Project is strictly confidential. Wilde’s sophomore directorial project stars Pugh as the inoffensively charismatic Alice, wife to Harry Styles’ Jack, with whom she lives in the 1950s-inspired Victory, where the heat of the California desert shimmers off the concrete of a cookie-cutter suburbia. Instead, Darling’s biggest error is a creeping rot that stems forward and backward from its much-hyped plot twist. For all the noise around Darling, the final product is neither a disaster nor the astute masterpiece it so yearns to be. That “chaos,” of course, could easily be in reference to the publicity coaster the Olivia Wilde-directed film has traversed since rumors first festered of a feud between Wilde and star Florence Pugh-but the term is perhaps even better applied to the choices of the film itself. To argue Don’t Worry Darling goes off the rails in its third act is to insult the (pretty, sun-baked) chaos that comes before it. ![]()
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