Don’t Worry Darling appears to be a covert version of Ira Levin’s landmark satire. Harry Styles and Florence Pugh play newlyweds Alice and Jack in the 1950s corporate town drama Don’t Worry Darling. Victory, California appears to be the ideal location, paid for by the enigmatic business Jack works for—perhaps even a bit too ideal, as Alice finds to her shock.
Don’t Worry Darling appears to be a covert version of Ira Levin’s landmark satire. Harry Styles and Florence Pugh play newlyweds Alice and Jack in the 1950s corporate town drama Don’t Worry Darling. Victory, California appears to be the ideal location, paid for by the enigmatic business Jack works for—perhaps even a bit too ideal, as Alice finds to her shock.
The Stepford Wives’ lead character is a young, ambitious, newlywed who moves to the suburbs with her husband. As her husband spends more and more time with a neighbourhood men’s group, she starts to have concerns about what lies beneath the happy veneer of her seemingly ideal paradise. However, her husband dismisses her concerns. This is similar to the Don’t Worry Darling protagonist. The movie adaptations made this implication explicit, and Florence Pugh’s most recent horror film Don’t Worry Darling also heavily implies it in its first trailer.
The plot of The Stepford Wives may change as a result of Don’t Worry, Darling. One example is that the Don’t Worry Darling trailer contains a few moments that imply Pugh’s character is actually a robot or automaton, a twist absent from both the original novel The Stepford Wives and its two film versions. Fans of vintage sci-fi satire, though, could still find the narrative of Don’t Worry Darling to be too familiar. To confuse audiences, the trailers may be emphasising the parallels between the well-known satirical horror film from the 1970s and Wilde’s film.
After all, director Jordan Peele, whose previous film Get Out also made reference to The Stepford Wives, strongly hinted that his 2022 sci-fi horror film Nope was about alien abduction. This is one of the most obvious visual references for the film Don’t Worry Darling. When Nope arrived in theatres, people were even more shocked to learn its true, darker origins. The plot of Don’t Worry Darling, in which a seemingly ideal post-war company town is revealed to be a male-dominated scheme to rob young wives of their freewill through scientific experimentation, will be a little too predictable for anyone familiar with The Stepford Wives and its existing adaptations, though, if this isn’t a clever promotional strategy.