Don’t Worry Darling has finally arrived in theaters, after months of buzz that went from eager to toxic seemingly overnight.
As Olivia Wilde’s sophomore feature-length directorial effort, following her universally praised teen comedy Booksmart, anticipation was high for this retro-style feminist parable. Then came months of offscreen scandals that sparked round after round of social media speculation, pushing Wilde to defend herself against rumors and comment about “spitgate” and the double standard that punishes female directors. Finally, the public can focus fully on the film itself.
Regrettably, that’s not great news.
The sultry thriller is stuffed with dazzling stars like Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Kate Berlant, and Wilde herself, all done up to the nines in ’50s-style garb. However, Wilde’s attempt at unnerving suspense is steadily undone by a screenplay (written by Booksmart‘s Katie Silberman, based on a story by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke) that offers more plot holes than plot points.
If you’ve ever seen a girl-gets-gaslit drama before (think Midsommar, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Gaslight), you’ll easily clock the standard steps of a heroine being steadily belittled so she’ll doubt her own eyes. But even as the wool is pulled away from them, Don’t Worry Darling‘s calamitously rushed final act leaves us with way more questions than answers. So, let’s dive in.
Here are our burning questions about the end of Don’t Worry Darling.
1. What’s Don’t Worry Darling about?
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Florence Pugh stars as Alice Chambers, a happy homemaker married to Jack (Harry Styles), a technical engineer whose work on the Victory Project gives the couple exclusive housing in a remote gated community with every amenity, from swimming pools to shopping centers, and charmingly attentive neighbors. However, this picture-perfect world begins to fracture when Alice experiences horrid visions, urging her to question not only what the Victory Project is but also the authority of its founder, a smirking bossman called Frank (Chris Pine). The harder she pushes, the harder he and his forces will push back.
2. How does the Victory Project work?
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Wilde has said that Frank is inspired by Jordan Peterson, describing the conservative internet personality as a “pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community.”
Fueled by the fantasy that the 1950s and their suffocating gender norms were heavenly for men and women alike, Frank has an online broadcast where he appeals to angry young men who feel useless and unloved — like Jack, who in reality is a greasy creep. The majority of the film takes place in a virtual community that looks like a shabby photocopy of the suburbs of Edward Scissorhands or Pleasantville. In Victory, all the men are dashing, in natty suits and classic cars. All the women are glamorous, wearing pristine dresses even as they scrub bathtubs and prepare elaborate dinners for their beloved breadwinners.
Meanwhile, in the real world, these men have their “wives” drugged and nonconsensually locked into virtual Victory via a shady system of IV drips and Clockwork Orange-esque eye devices. When the men of Victory presumably go to work on the mysterious Victory Project, they’re actually just going to whatever real-world job they need to support this lifestyle. But this explanation, laid out in flashbacks and frenzied exposition from Jack, leaves us with a lot more questions.
3. What was that rumbling?
When Alice is making Jack breakfast, and later when she’s shopping with her gal pals, the world around them shudders violently, rattling glass and nerves. Peg (a crackerjack Kate Berlant) speculates that the rumblings come from underground laboratories, where Project Victory is building weapons. However, the big reveal is that the menfolk are building nothing beyond their virtual utopia. So, how to explain the rumbling?
As Jack and Alice live in an apartment that seems on the less-spectacular side, perhaps the rattle is a nearby elevated train? But that doesn’t explain why Peg and Bunny can also feel it. Maybe it’s what happens when Project Victory gets an update? However, nothing else visibly changes to suggest that. So, really, your guess is as good as ours.
4. What’s the deal with Bunny?
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
In the final act, Bunny (Olivia Wilde) drops hers. Yep, she knows they’re in a sexist simulation. And she chooses to play along because here, she has her children. In a frenzied exchange with Alice, Bunny implies her children are dead in real life, but mothering their simulations is enough to keep her willfully imprisoned in Victory.
Still, this begs a bigger question. If Bunny knows her children are actually dead, and Frank’s mysterious tech can erase a woman’s memory from before her time in Victory, why would Bunny choose to know her children aren’t real? Why wouldn’t she choose to be brainwashed into thinking they are alive and nothing’s wrong?
The movie doesn’t give us substantial clues on this matter. However, you can either speculate that without this knowledge, Bunny previously suffered the breakdowns Margaret and Alice had. Or maybe Bunny was hip to Frank’s podcast in the real world, and she was the one to initiate the “move” to Victory. Hard to say, as her reveal — and all the world-building that comes after — are done in a mad dash to a climax.
5. What did the red plane mean?
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Was the plane crash in Don’t Worry Darling real? No. Like Alice’s visions of hollow eggshells and the house closing in on her, the red plane crashing into the mountain seems to be her brain trying to alert her to danger. Notably, it’s the plane that pinpoints where the off-limits headquarters are.
Other uses of red in the film suggest that the plane was a warning. The first sighting of a red plane is the toy one that a mournful Margaret (KiKi Layne) holds. It is a relic of her vanished son. Red is also the color of the blood when Margaret slits her own throat, as well as the color of the jumpsuits worn by the mysterious men who rush in to sweep away troublesome women. Lastly, a splash of blood red is part of the transition process when one leaves or enters the Victory Project.
6. Why did Shelley stab Frank?
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Alice is on the run. Jack is dead. Streetlights are exploding, and the wives of the Victory Project look unnerved. Are these last two visual cues meant to imply Frank is losing his grip on the mind control of the captive wives? Has Shelley (Gemma Chan) — who fiercely defended him in the earlier dinner party scene — remembered the whole of who her husband is? Has she realized her eerily perfect twins are eerily perfect because they are simulations? Has she essentially awakened and overheard just enough of her husband’s communications with the pursuing men that she realizes killing him will be the death of Victory?
As she delivers the presumably fatal blow to his belly with a kitchen knife, Shelley says, “It’s my turn now.”
For a moment, I wondered if this meant she’d be seizing control of Victory, and like Bunny, she knowingly signed onto this heternormative nightmare. But the horrified look that newcomer Violet (Sydney Chandler) turned on her husband, as they all watched Alice flee in the previous scene, has me thinking that Shelley has also awoken. So, by “my turn,” she means now it’s her turn to violate the body and will of her spouse. That she does it with a kitchen tool, a device Frank feels is in the realm of womanhood, is icing on the poetic justice cake.
7. Do only men die in Victory?
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When Jack lunges at Alice, she clocks him with a whiskey glass, cracking open his pretty face and getting blood all over her pretty dress. Also, she kills him. And not just in the simulation. A knowing Bunny proclaims, “If a man dies here, he dies in the real world.”
First off, why? For all the time Don’t Worry Darling spends on having Frank prattle on about gender roles and self-determination, couldn’t he have taken a few moments to lay out how a virtual blow to the head could really kill a man?
Did the men know this going in? And why did Bunny phrase it this way? Do women not die in Victory? Is Margaret dead? Or did her suicide attempt bump her out of the simulation’s hold? Is that why Dr. Collins (Timothy Simons) says she’s better now? Or is that just another bold-faced lie to keep Alice complacent? If Margaret is dead, was her husband booted from Victory to sever ties? Or did he choose to leave when his reason for being there was gone? Then again, if you can make virtual children, why not a virtual wife?
Okay, let me pull out of this spin. Presumably, gender doesn’t matter when it comes to virtual death causing a real one. Or at least that’s what Alice believes. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have to race to the edge of their virtual reality, Truman Show-style.
8. Wait, but seriously, how does the Victory Project work?
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
You mean how do these men not only hold down a job, but also feed, wash, and deal with the bodily functions of these “wives” 24/7? How has no alarm been sounded when at least 72 people have gone missing — including a seemingly respected doctor with a busy schedule?
And how do drugs and alcohol work there? Why does the not-so-good doctor urge Alice to take pills to calm her nerves when presumably Jack could just be slipping drugs into her IV without her ever knowing?
9. Who are the men in red?
Are they employees of Frank? Outraged incels trying to work program their way into Victory? Or are they programmed in like the little children, who make terrific cocktails? Sorry. I’ve got no idea.
10. What does the end of Don’t Worry Darling mean?
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After killing Jack and getting an explanation from Bunny, Alice steals a car to race out of Victory, back to the tower on a mountain, where she blacked out before.
What the movie didn’t show that first time was Alice waking in the real world, only to be plunged back into Victory by the devious Jack. This time, she’s racing to reality with no Jack on the other side to drop her back in, but lots of men in red jumpsuits on her tail. Car chases lead to collisions and a final sprint to escape. As Alice reaches the glass door, on comes the familiar flurry of images Wilde has sprinkled throughout the film: a splash of red, dancing girls in black and white, and a blue eye dilating — then a glimpse of Alice in her modern reality, dancing wildly in casual clothes. Finally, as the film cuts to black, we hear Alice’s ragged gasp, as if she’s just woken up from a terrible dream.
However, after all that time in the Victory project, what world will she wake up to? How long has she been gone? Has Jack kept proper care of her? Did it include physical exercise so her muscles haven’t atrophied? Alone in an apartment with the corpse of her partner, what is she to do? Don’t Worry Darling won’t spoil its glossy climax with the crushing reality of what might come next.
Don’t Worry Darling is now in theaters.
