I’ve been thinking recently that I underestimated Olivia Wilde’s 2022 thriller, Don’t Worry Darling. I found myself reflecting on it after I saw Barbie, and then again, after Oppenheimer. In the Venn diagram between all three movies there are utopian desert communities; heroes who question the nature of reality; and a pervasive sense of existential dread. But what is most interesting is how similar they are, visually. Its characters are all very stylish people, living in stylish spaces. There’s an unusual attention to color and set design, and the odd sense that everything you see is very real—in the sense of touchable—but also a bit of a mirage. (Oppenheimer nearly says something to this effect, when he’s describing atomic structures.) There’s a sense of something false lurking beneath the orderly surface; the job of the protagonist in each film is to discover and confront uncomfortable and even ugly truths.
Like many critics, I wrote off Wilde’s film as too full of plot holes to take seriously, but I decided to revisit it in light of Gerwig and Nolan’s films. I found a much better and more politically prescient movie than I had remembered.