You should worry, darling

They didn’t just lose the plot, they gave it concrete shoes and tossed it in the harbour

I don’t know about you, but I love celebrity drama. The drama behind the movie Don’t Worry Darling was so engaging that I had to see the movie.

For a quick recap on the drama, our main actors and their characters are Florence Pugh who plays Alice, Harry Styles who plays Jack, Olivia Wilde who is the director and plays Bunny, and Shia LaBeouf who was cast as Jack but didn’t end up in the movie. Jason Sudeikis is not in the movie but was in a relationship with Wilde, who was romantically involved with Styles during much of the promotion of the movie. The movie marketed itself using its sex scenes very heavily, which Pugh was not happy about, especially when Wilde kept talking about them.

Wilde claimed that she fired Shia LaBeouf, but LaBeouf claimed that he quit, and a video leaked of Wilde telling LaBeouf that she wanted to figure things out and the situation was “a wake-up call for Miss Flo [Florence Pugh].” After this, Pugh stopped doing press events for Don’t Worry Darling. Very recently, Wilde flipped the switch, saying that people have been talking too much about the sex scenes, when the person talking about it all along was Wilde.

This discussion is not spoiler free, so if you want to watch the movie unspoiled, stop reading here.

What the fuck is this movie? The whole movie leaves you wondering what is happening and why it is happening. I never once had a solid grasp on what was going on, even with the “happy relationship” between Alice and Jack. We get a happy relationship for maybe 20 minutes before things start going down. The only real proof feels like what the other characters say about the couple.

Harry Styles is fine as an actor, but I spent so long wondering if he was supposed to be British or not. In the beginning, I could not tell if he was British or trying and failing to do an American accent. He was British in Victory, but I wasn’t entirely convinced despite it being Harry’s actual accent.

Why are all the main characters White except Gemma Chan? The only main character of colour is Margaret, who is immediately seen and treated as crazy, and then kills herself. Even though Gemma Chan is the only POC main character, she’s barely there. She teaches the dance class, she yells at Alice, and she stabs Frank (played by Chris Pine) – which was a great move, and I was very proud of her, but I spent the end of that movie so confused about her character. How much did Shelley know about Victory and about Frank? I don’t know and I don’t know if Wilde knew either.

Why is Olivia Wilde’s forehead so big with her hairstyle? Her forehead is normally not that big. She made the movie; she could have given herself a different hairstyle.

Why does Harry Styles spend several minutes doing a weird tap dance with his hand in the air, making 360-degree turns? Why does Harry Styles dance like that? It was not good.

The movie’s moral resolution is: don’t listen to podcasts. That’s it. You spend the entire movie questioning what’s happening to Alice and what’s happening in Victory, and the answer is that podcasts are bad. Real-life Jack listens to a podcast, made by Chris Pine’s character Frank, decides to apply for Victory, gets in, and is essentially holding Alice hostage.

He’s keeping her trapped in their room, giving her water through a cloth he wrings out, has her hooked up to IVs, and it’s all very strange and weird. And we never get a conclusion to what happens to Alice when she wakes up and is out of the weird simulation thing. And, what happens to the other women who are stuck in Victory who have not even been in relationships with the men they’re married to in the simulation? They make you believe that there’s at least five or six women who have been kidnapped and are now being forced to live in this simulation where they’re married to these men, who honestly seem like incels.

It certainly was a movie, and it certainly was an experience to watch it in theaters. It’s not good, but it’s not bad either; it’s so bad it’s enjoyable, but only with a friend. Don’t watch this alone, and don’t be afraid to make fun of it the whole time because it’s absurd.