In the year 2019, Olivia Wilde made her directorial debut with Booksmart, the teen comedy film starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as two straight-edge high school students who endeavor to transgressively mark their graduation by attending a party. Along the way, they run into a serial killer, become stop-motion animated, reconcile the pains in their friendship, and share the screen with a revelatory Billie Lourd as their classmate Gigi. It is completely and utterly wonderful.
Wilde’s next directorial effort was Don’t Worry Darling. Worrying, evidently, is something that she and her cast and crew should have done a lot more.
But none of those worries had to do with streaming viewership. Per FlixPatrol, this day of Oct. 17 has seen Don’t Worry Darling debut at the top of Prime Video‘s Top 10 film rankings in the United Kingdom. It stars Florence Pugh as Alice Chambers, a 1950s-era housewife who lives with her husband Jack (Harry Styles) in the Californian town of Victory. The men aren’t allowed to talk about what they do for work, which is clue number one to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the existence of the town, Alice’s life, and Alice herself.
Don’t Worry Darling is a decidedly well-acted film whose ideas are simultaneously poorly executed, worth talking about, and difficult to talk about without giving too much away. Chris Pine’s character — a man by the name of Frank who Wilde herself said was inspired by Jordan Peterson — is the most I’ll say about that.
Its biggest diegetic problem is that it wants to build a sprawling world/puzzle for Alice (and, by extension, us audiences) to get lost in, but makes us infer things that don’t have enough depth to infer anything meaningful from, all while treating its most elementary mysteries as though they’re the most major points of intrigue. Its biggest real-world problem, however, is the gargantuan drama monster that wandered out of the production side of things.
Indeed, all the plot twists in the world would have held less attention than the reported on-set conflicts between Pugh and Wilde, Wilde and LaBeouf (who was originally set to play Jack and was allegedly fired for poor behavior), Styles and Pine, and just about every possible pairing you can imagine. Shortly after the film’s theatrical release, 40 members of Don’t Worry Darling‘s crew dismissed all the rumors as false, and conflict reports have been denied time and time again.
It’s of course unfortunate that Don’t Worry Darling, as middling as it is, was overshadowed by fundamentally uninteresting interpersonal drama. But hey, anything to get Killer Heat further away from the top spot (at the time of writing, the sloppy Joseph Gordon-Levitt crime drama that would most aptly be characterized as “content” is sitting at second place).
Also of note is the library of Daniel Craig-era James Bond films populating the Top 10, including No Time to Die, Skyfall, Spectre, and the most interesting of the bunch; Casino Royale.
Safely one of, if not the best James Bond film out there, Casino Royale marked Craig’s foray into the shoes of Agent 007, and was notable for taking the character of Bond — a clean, sharp, womanizing Mary Sue whose prowess as an agent is only matched by his utterly despicable personality — and reinventing him with a pronounced emotional core that rendered him just as vulnerable as anyone else.
It was a decidedly intelligent choice that has earned every bit of praise that it’s received (to say nothing of Craig’s individual performance, which some touted for an Oscar nomination at the time), but at the same time, one has to wonder if Casino Royale was actually a good movie, or if it simply took advantage of the very low bar set by the Bonds of yore to make itself seem like a good movie. Indeed, it may be the best Bond film, but that’s no great feat if all it had to do was operate in an honest emotional framework for once.