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therewillbeblus wrote: Tue Oct 25, 2022 1:10 am After the barely-competent Booksmart, it was mildly heartening to find Wilde's technical skills as a director to be the best aspect of Don't Worry Darling. More expectedly is that Pugh does a fine job with the scraps she's given to emote off of, but the material sucks. It's a lot like the latest season of Black Mirror in its unnecessarily earnest and extended milking of winking, unidimensional ideas, here exemplifying Gaslighting 101. Everything is just so overstated and superficial in its topical grazings that any actual relatability to the vulnerable core of emotional abuse is blocked by the armor of the high concept. I also can't help but feel like Wilde's interest in the script is simultaneously serving as a vanity project to pander to a zeitgeist she feels a part of, and repurpose another's work to tell Her Story regarding personalized trauma from her divorce with Sudeikis. He implicitly aired his own struggles regarding their separation and shared child custody in the first season of Ted Lasso, with more care and less pointedly manipulative or obvious grievances (not that he doesn't have them... serving custody papers at a public ceremony isn't subtle, which may count for more than subtlety in Art!) but maybe this isn't a one-upsman-show, or a profession to be seen. Maybe content this reactive, on-the-nose yet vapid, just feels that way at its baseline.

Anyways, speculative reflexiveness aside, Wilde's film falls apart on itself in its last act in so many ways I couldn't keep count. In what should be the dramatic crescendo (and could certainly double as an opportunity for ego-feeding, given Wilde's own maneuvering into center-stage participation in it), I don't even know what her own character's disclosure means for the intended thematic payoff. The film can't figure out what it wants to say about the most interesting questions embedded in the psychological dilemmas presented by Wilde's self-casted spotlight moment: on the value in objective vs subjective reality, and weighing the importance of emotional vs philosophical drives; i.e. prioritizing selfish individual needs for erasing pain and achieving emotional security, or overriding these consolations in favor of a rational utilitarian position, both of which can be inclusive of empathy. Or what this dilemma -to latch onto tangible holds that can alleviate fear-based dysphoria with momentary doses of delusion, or to patronize those harmfully solipsistic Me and Mine attitude-adopters with democratic rage about the greater good- has to say about not only our current sociopolitical climate, but the inherent traits a person has within them to exert the more comfortable act for their personality, rather than moralizing the action divorced from the person's nature and default conditioning. Or what the ultimate reveal says about the timeless pressure of gender roles on both sides of fence, perhaps encouraging a split focus of compassionately lending perspective to consider who is providing for who, and how those expectations serve, isolate, and oppress both principals in a set.

There's a wealth of text begging to be unpacked at least a little bit, with all the blatant signifiers on the page and visualized with heated passion being regurgitated into voids, but Wilde doesn't explore anything here. She plays things frustratingly safe, and the film is insulting for it. Also, yes Harry Styles is awful and doesn't sell what he needs to sell, but the character is so underwritten that I had a difficult time picturing Shia LaBeouf in the part. I think he could've potentially done some nifty things in the role, especially in the last act, but it would've been a completely different movie - a raw, messy one, and probably something very different than what Wilde is comfortable doing, i.e. risking a few cents to see the flop on a decent hand. I'm not surprised at all that Shia had other ideas and was interested in creating some perverse dynamics on set to turn this into... something (anything?) but the most exciting takeaway from Don't Worry Darling is musing on what those ideas actually were, and how the film could've been bettered had his collaboration been welcomed and informed script changes, to literally any degree

Matt wrote: Thu Jan 22, 2026 8:01 am The film I never thought I would actually be able to see, The People's Joker, is now on Tubi.