Don't Worry Darling Trailer: Florence Pugh Is Gaslit In Olivia Wilde's Creepy Thriller
The first trailer for "Don't Worry Darling" is finally here, and Olivia Wilde's sophomore directorial effort looks freaky and beautiful. The full trailer gives viewers their full first look at musician Harry Styles in his second major on-screen role, and also hints at some of the secrets beneath the surface of its sun-dappled 1950s community.
"Don't Worry Darling" looks like a beautiful party gone wrong. The trailer opens with a group of friends, including Styles' Jack and Florence Pugh's Alice, laughing, drinking, dancing, and generally living their best retro lives. But it soon becomes clear that something odd is going on in the group's idyllic town. Jack and the other men head off to work on something called the Victory Project, which seems to be represented by Chris Pine's character.
Cracks beneath a beautiful surface
"We men, we ask a lot," Pine says in voiceover as we see clips of the wives waving their husbands off to work. "We ask for strength, food at home, a house clean, and discretion above all else." It's pretty obvious that he doesn't mean discretion in the "Mad Men" sense of the term, although everyone here seems to be getting plenty of hanky panky in. No, there's something else that the community isn't talking about, and only Alice seems to be aware of it.
It's tough to tell exactly what to expect from "Don't Worry Darling" based on these fragments, but it looks like a heady sci-fi thriller with shades of "The Stepford Wives." Planes seem to glitch out in the sky, eggshells crack with no egg inside, and a wall quite literally starts closing in on Alice. "Everyone is acting like I'm crazy, and I'm not crazy," she says, as we see a woman slam her face into a mirror mid ballet class.
The film's scenes of decadence and period-specific glamor are also punctuated by a fiery car crash, a black-and-white performance sequence, and a group of red-suited men grabbing Alice by the arms. The overall impression is one of eeriness, beauty, and sensory overload–by design. Also, Styles gets to dance! Wilde has already proven herself a strong directorial voice with the critically acclaimed "Booksmart." "Don't Worry Darling" looks just as assured, gorgeous and uncanny in an extremely intriguing way.
Wilde, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, and Nick Kroll round out the cast. The film is set to premiere in theaters on September 23, 2022.