Don’t Worry Darling
Cert 15 | ★★★★✩

Actor Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut feature was the multi-award-winning quirky teen comedy Booksmart in 2019.

Starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, the film followed the trials and tribulations of two gifted high-school students. Wilde is now back with the long-awaited Don’t Worry Darling, a psychological thriller starring Florence Pugh (Little Women, Midsommar), pop sensation Harry Styles (Dunkirk) and Jewish actor Nick Kroll (Dinner for Schmucks, Portlandia).

Pugh and Styles play Alice and Jack Chambers, a seemingly happy young couple living the perfect white-picket-fence life in 1950s America.

rev-1-DWD-06560r High Res JPEG

Florence Pugh

In between cleaning, cooking and welcoming her husband back from work with a smile and a drink in hand, Alice is also expected to attend nightly parties involving Jack’s charismatic boss Frank (Chris Pine), his colleagues and their wives.

Cracks begin to form when Alice starts suspecting that all isn’t quite what it seems and that Jack may be hiding something from her.

As she struggles to make sense of things, Alice has no one left to turn to when she is unceremoniously dropped by Bunny (Wilde), her best friend and confidante who also happened to be married to Dean (Kroll), Jack’s best friend.

Much has been made of the rumoured atmosphere on-set between Pugh and Wilde over the late addition of Styles — the singer who is Wilde’s partner, replaced Shia LaBeouf at the rehearsal stage — but nothing could have prepared the director or her cast for the media circus when the film opened at Venice earlier this month. In all my years as a film critic, I have never seen anything quite as unhinged .

It’s a film full of intrigue, heightened paranoia and 50s nostalgia, elevated by Matthew Libatique’s sunny cinematography.

Pugh gives yet another impeccable turn as does Wilde as glamorous chain-smoking 50s housewife Bunny.

For his part, Styles is sadly the weakest link here and one wonders how his character would have fared had LaBeouf remained attached to the project.

Wilde has delivered another unapologetically and staunchly feminist story. While the noise surrounding the production may feel unfair, it’s also given the film the kind of publicity that money can’t