Don’t Worry Darling arrived as 2022’s hottest movie mess, and it has everything society seems to love these days. With the rumors of bad blood between the movie’s director, Olivia Wilde, and its lead mudslinging from Shia LaBeouf, this movie has very much so created a loud buzz throughout pop culture today.
The movie is a ’50s-set psychological thriller that stars Florence Pugh as a suburban housewife who discovers dark truths while living in an isolated, Stepford-like community in the low California desert. Pugh’s character devotes herself to doting over her house, her cooking duties, and of course her husband Jack (Harry Styles).
Jack spends his days at a secretive workplace run by community leader Frank (Chris Pine) while she cooks, cleans, shops, goes to dancing lessons, and socializes with other wives like Bunny (Olivia Wilde, also the film’s director). It’s a life that seems too good to be true, which of course means it won’t be long before it descends into chaos.
With this movie being so heavily circulated by the public, there also seem to be some controversial opinions about it. According to The Guardian in their Don’t Worry Darling Review, “Styles over Substance”, they say that “Wilde leans too heavily on surface and style, as a distraction from the fact that the story itself is riddled with inconsistencies and barely holds together. The same is true of Styles, who is too inexperienced as an actor to deliver the complexity that his role requires. He’s glassily superficial, giving a performance entirely untroubled by a hint of an interior life. In contrast, Pugh is phenomenal, throwing everything she has into her role and carrying large chunks of the film more or less single-handedly.”
Continuously, controversial reviews blast the internet about the poor choice of acting in the film, as well as even the controversy within the cast as well. Allegedly, there has been some off-screen drama and scandals that have come out since the movie came to theaters.
According to Complex, “In early 2020, multiple outlets reported that Shia LaBeouf—then fresh off the critical success of his semi-autobiographical Honey Boy—had signed on to join Pugh and Chris Pine in Wilde’s film. Mere months later, however, LaBeouf was revealed to no longer be a part of the production.” Rumors that “Pugh had promoted the film on her Instagram, including the brevity with which she shared a DWD clip to the main timeline in August of this year, and lack of promotion when the trailer debuted in April,” have also circulated in the media.
Not only has the controversy lighted the scene of the movie within itself, but many people that have seen the movie have mixed feelings and opinions about it. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie got a 38% on the Tomatometer and a 79% on the audience score. Therefore this movie can definitely be seen from both the good and bad areas.
Regardless of all the drama that has tied into this movie, good reviews have also skyrocketed and and has definitely given viewers a movie experience worth seeing.
