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Paradise is under threat in the trailer for director Olivia Wilde's forthcoming psychological thriller, Don't Worry Darling, in which the blissful bubble of married couple Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice (Florence Pugh) is about to burst. The trailer shows the couple fight and make up, as he rages at her questioning the suspended reality she finds them living inside, before a very NSFW shot of husband going down on wife at the dining room table. Perhaps that answers what Styles was so busy doing that he skipped the Met Ball on Monday.
With hints of The Truman Show, the trailer suggests something more sinister lurking beyond the manicured lawns of their glamorous Fifties suburbia. As in the speculative fiction of horror films like Jordan Peele's Us or John Krasinski's A Quiet Place series, a world that at first feels familiar reveals itself to be something else entirely. In this case we witness reality appear to glitch when Alice cracks an egg to find its insides empty, see footage of her tearing cling film off her face, or being grabbed and chased across the desert by figures in red. The culprit for these disturbed sequences, or so it appears, is the mysterious Victory Project, an enterprise that the men of the community work for.
An original screenplay, there is no source material from which insight can be gleaned, but there's still plenty of clues as to what the plot might involve from the trailer. One theory that stacks up is that the Victory Project is a kind of cult – if the red jumpsuit fits, etc – as when Alice starts to ask too many questions she threatens to break the spell that has entranced them all. One man who finds her questions especially intriguing is the robotic Victory Project leader Frank (Chris Pine), who responds to her outburst over dinner by gesturing for her to continue, saying: “I'm curious where she's going with this.”
Frank and his CEO perma-grin is the most likely candidate for the charismatic but dark mastermind of this mysterious operation, but it is curious that he isn't the one to try and shut her down. Instead it is Jack who is enraged by Alice's behaviour, angrily warning her: “Our life together, we could lose this”, suggesting he is withholding something about the project from her.
One recurrent motif in the trailer is the sound or image of planes flying overhead, or trailed as a child's toy, seen in the same shade of red that a swarm of figures on the chase are later wearing. Are these planes there to keep people out or in? If you look closely at one shot of Alice staring up at a plane flying overhead, there is a split second where the sky blurs as though an invisible barrier between the ground and the sky can momentarily be seen.
The sound of plane's engines can be heard as Olivia Wilde's character Mary says, "Boys and their toys, at least we know they're getting work done", which is just one of the hints at traditional gender roles that appears in the trailer. The film often echoes the stylised suburban nostalgia of Ira Levin's 1972 novel The Stepford Wives, a story in which submissive housewives were revealed to in fact be robots created and controlled by their husbands. Another clue as to this theme is the patronising phrase that the film takes its title from, hinting at a community where wives are kept in the dark, instead instructed to blindly trust their husband's words instead of what is in front of their eyes.
Perhaps, despite the heavy clues that we have been transported to the Fifties, this world is instead a dispatch from a frightening future of female submission that America has returned to. Could the intruders to the community be the fear of the real world knocking at their door? It's a reality that doesn't feel quite so farfetched, given the trailer arrived the day before leaked Supreme Court documents showed plans to drastically curtail women's rights over their own bodies, dismantling the Roe vs. Wade legislation that protects abortion. If true, given the way the world is going, Don't Worry Darling will make for light relief come September 2022.
