Don't Worry Darling 4K 2022 Ultra HD 2160p

The film tells the story of housewife Alice, who discovers the shocking truth about her husband Jack, which puts her own idyllic life in jeopardy. The story is set in the 1950s.

Don't Worry Darling 4K Review
The 50's, an upscale neighborhood of an American secret city, every morning the men are off somewhere in polished cars, their housewives drinking in broad daylight, cooking, cleaning the house, and discussing children, husbands, and clothes. Alice (Florence Pugh), like her neighbors, is happily married to Jack (Harry Styles); she sees him off in just a man's shirt and meets him in an evening gown, ready for sex. That's how Alice would have lived on, but a vicious question arises in her mind, "What's outside the settlement that can't be left?"

If this synopsis reminded you of a lot of famous movies and TV shows, you can guess the ending of "Don't Worry, Sunshine," the second feature by actress and director Olivia Wilde. The first is the typical teen comedy "Education" (2019), which somehow won the love of critics and audiences, despite losing to both the noughties classic ("Mean Girls") and modern reimaginings of the genre ("Lady Bird"). It is unclear why the director was interested in the school story in the first place, because it could have been created by the production team of any major studio. In the case of "Don't Worry, Sunshine," the answer to "Why?" is much easier: Olivia Wilde is a feminist, and her new project is about controlling overbearing men over women.

"Don't Worry, Sunshine" is an anti-utopia, reminiscent of "The Truman Show" in everything: people live in the same houses, talk about nothing, everything looks as fake and lifeless as possible, like in commercials. In such a world exists the main character Alice, every day is like another: in the morning she makes coffee and eggs and bacon, then washes clean windows and a shiny bath, spends time with the neighbors and in the evening she meets her lover. At one of the parties, Alice notices the strange behavior of Margaret (Kiki Lane), repeating that something is being hidden from them. This, of course, turns out to be true, but it doesn't matter much for the analysis of the film. More important is the form in which Olivia Wilde has chosen to deliver (read capitalize) her critique of male society. She has chosen the most straightforward genre, where it is only a step away from affectation.

Alice starts asking "unnecessary" questions of her husband and neighbors, so Jack calls her a doctor who prescribes antidepressants. Thus Wilde raises the hushed up, lasting since the 50s for the U.S. the problem of bored housewives' addiction to pills. This situation is shown in Call Jane (on theaters October 27) and Rosemary's Baby, except that Wilde invites the viewer to question the heroine's mental state: Alice wraps polythene around her head, the space around her shrinks, while cooking her eggs come up empty, and so on. This breaks the script, because the uncertainty of what happens in reality makes all the events of the film questionable. In "Black Swan" and "Joker" the authors make it clear that their characters are going crazy, while Olivia Wilde has an understatement that is not resolved by the finale.

Conceptually, the film is inferior to its predecessors, even when not compared to classics ("Rosemary's Baby," "The Truman Show"): "Don't Worry, Sunshine" is weaker than many of the "Black Mirror" series, which also speculates on pressing contemporary issues. Wilde's work lacks dynamism; with a running time of two hours, she allows herself to repeat the same actions instead of building up the tension between the characters. In terms of dystopia, Don't Worry, Sunshine is a mild movie, it would have been much more winning if the authors had shown the nightmare of life in "paradise" without the schizophrenic scenes: the inability to have an abortion, complete dependence on men, the critical inequalities in society.

That said, the film itself was an example of inequality - Harry Styles is rumored to have received a fee three times that of Florence Pugh. You can justify this outnumbering by the singer's fame, important for marketing the film (and getting into the Venice Film Festival), but his romance with Olivia Wilde gets in the way. Watching Don't Worry, Sunshine, you can see that Pugh "pulls" his acting throughout the film, in the paired scenes with Stiles, the camera most often captures his face half-turned and hers in full-face. Unfortunately, in the real world, it was the man who got all the media attention because of the made-up spitting at the premiere screening. As they say, it wasn't worth a damn.