The Chris Pine Sci-Fi Thriller On Netflix That Will Break Your Brain
The 2022 Netflix film Don’t Worry Darling features Chris Pine and other notable stars in a world reminiscent of The Stepford Wives. Pine plays a character named Frank, the leader of a group of men who enjoy seemingly perfect lives with their seemingly perfect wives.
Don’t Worry Darling is available to stream on Netflix.
Directed by Olivia Wilde (who played “Thirteen” in House), Florence Pugh (Oppenheimer) and Harry Styles (Dunkirk) play a young couple, Jack and Alice, who are extremely happy with their quintessential existence. Jack and the rest of the men from the picture-perfect company town leave for work each morning, and the wives stay at home tending to the children and various house duties.
All is well in the little town of Victory until Alice begins noticing some troubling events occurring around her. Margaret (Kiki Layne) is a character in Don’t Worry Darling who suffered a mental breakdown after losing her son out in the surrounding desert, and she has subsequently become an outcast among her peers.
Alice witnesses Margaret’s husband giving her medication to calm her down one evening after an outburst. She also encounters Frank (Chris Pine) being quite the voyeur during an intimate moment between her and her husband Jack.
After seeing a plane crash in the surrounding desert, Alice exits the protection of their perfect town to try and help the people involved in the crash. During her exploration, she discovers the men’s working headquarters in the desert outside of Victory.
While exploring the headquarters, she touches a mirror-like window and begins having strange hallucinations of another life. Unexplainably, she later wakes up at home with no knowledge of how she got there.
In the days following, Alice begins experiencing an array of strange occurrences and even receives a phone call from Margaret who claims to have seen the same things. Alice brushes her confessions aside and later witnesses Margaret falling to her death off of a nearby roof. She runs to be by Margaret’s side but is quickly taken away by a bunch of men in red suits who work for Frank and begins having more strange hallucinations.
Don’t Worry Darling makes it clear that stepping outside of the status quo in the town of Victory can have some pretty dire consequences. As the truth about the town is slowly revealed to Alice, the fallout of her discoveries becomes dark and dangerous for her and those she loves.
Olivia Wilde allegedly based Chris Pine’s Don’t Worry Darling character on real-life influencer Jordan Peterson.
Though the movie came out in a gorgeous fashion, the filming of the movie was rumored to have some conflict afoot. Harry Styles’ character, Jack, was originally cast as Shia LeBeouf, but Shia exited the role early on in the filming process.
Don’t Worry Darling‘s director, Olivia Wilde, claims that she fired LeBeouf after Florence Pugh complained that she wasn’t comfortable with the way Shia was behaving. However, Shia LeBeouf maintains that he quit the film despite Wilde’s repeated efforts to keep him on in the role.
It was also rumored that Wilde and Pugh had a knockdown, drag-out shouting match on set during the production of the film, after which Warner Bros. executives had to mediate between the two to get the shooting back on track.
Regardless of the problems the cast and crew may have encountered during the making of Don’t Worry Darling, the film made more than $45 million in the United States and Canada, and over $42 million throughout the rest of the world, for a total of nearly $88 million.
Despite the moving doing fairly well in theaters, critics had no trouble finding reasons to pick at the perfection of the film. Some stated that the themes present in the movie were far too familiar and repetitive of other popular flicks.
Don’t Worry Darling overcame a wild press tour to become a success, earning $87 million.
However, the news wasn’t all bad. Critics praised Florence Pugh’s performance as Alice, the cinematography, and the overall style of the movie. Viewers of the movie gave Don’t Worry Darling a “B-” rating on CinemaScore.
If you’re looking for a little escape from the monotony of the world, take some time out to watch Don’t Worry Darling streaming on Netflix. The movie has an “R” rating and a runtime of a little over two hours. Let Olivia Wilde and the rest of the cast take you on a thrilling adventure in a weird world of secrets and lies.
