The plot and the meaning of the ending of the film “Don’t Worry, Darling” seemed secondary to many viewers. And indeed, the creators managed to shoot a high-quality picture, but they failed to achieve originality. The highly publicized plot twist at the end was pretty predictable, especially for sci-fi fans. At the same time, the authors decided not to answer a number of questions that inevitably arise during the viewing.
What is the movie “Don’t Worry, Darling” about?
Don’t Worry, Darling is set in what is described as an ideal American 1950s glossy magazine town. The main character Alice lives with her husband Jack, enjoying prosperity and luxury. In addition to them, in this place there are, it seems, exclusively married couples, with or without children. Every day, Jack, along with the rest of the men, leaves for work in a secret bunker, while Alice and other women stay at home. They clean, cook, go shopping and dance classes.
Women know almost nothing about the meaning of their husbands’ work. The only thing they know is the name of the secret project (“Victory”). However, most try not to delve into it. Actually, there are two rules that must be observed in the town: do not ask unnecessary questions and do not go beyond the boundaries of the settlement into the desert. It is believed that if you violate the latter, you can expose your life to unprecedented danger.
One day, everyone goes to a party hosted by the head of the project “Victory” Frank and his wife Shelley. Margaret also appears at the celebration, who says: “We don’t belong here.” No one but Alice paid any attention to this. She saw how Margaret’s husband took her to a back room and tried to give her medicine. Alice is excited and tries to tell Jack about it, but her husband won’t let her speak.
While preparing dinner, the heroine suddenly notices that the chicken eggs are empty inside. Anxiety intensifies. Then she goes to the city and, in order to unwind, sit down on a bus plying on it. In it, the girl saw a plane crash in the mountains. The driver doesn’t notice anything and refuses to escort Alice to the crash site to see if anyone needs help. Having entered the forbidden territory, the heroine climbs the mountain and sees a certain dome there. Touching its transparent walls, she is subjected to strange hallucinations.
Alice’s consciousness turns off, after which she wakes up in her house and finds her husband fussing over cooking in the kitchen. In response to questions, Jack says that the girl was already in the house at the time of his arrival and he did not notice anything strange.
Hallucinations and paranoid thoughts gradually begin to consume Alice’s consciousness. One day, at a dance class, she sees Margaret in the reflection, who is smashing her head against the mirror. Excited, Alice goes to her ex-girlfriend’s house and sees her standing on the roof. Margaret cuts her own throat and falls. A shocked Alice is led away by men in red suits. At home, the girl again tries to talk to her husband, but he does not believe her words and claims that there was no suicide. According to him, Margaret was washing windows and stumbled.
Frank’s partner Doctor Collins confirms Jack’s story. He recommends that Alice take sedatives. During a conversation with him, the girl sees a folder in his bag with the inscription “Security Threat” and the name Margaret. The heroine quietly steals the documents, but it is impossible to understand their content: most of the words are covered with black stripes.
A few days later, the heroine invites her neighbors to dinner. While Jack was talking to the guests, Frank came to Alice’s kitchen and made it clear that he knew about her conversation with Bunny. Moreover, he hints that the girl’s guesses about the falsity of this place are true.
At the common table, Alice sets out in front of everyone the obvious defects of the surrounding world. It turns out that all the residents came from the same places, they also spend their holidays in the same places. Even the dating history of all spouses coincides down to the smallest details. But the guests do not try to give any explanation for this, preferring to ignore the girl’s words.
Dr. Collins, along with other doctors, subjects Alice to electroshock therapy. In between torments, the girl sees her former life, in which she was also a doctor and worked for days in the operating room. Alice went home tired, where she was met by an unemployed Jack, unsuccessfully trying to draw his wife’s attention to himself.
Alice returns to the memory-wiped town. However, hallucinations begin to torment her again. In addition, after a while, Alice still remembers who she used to be and realizes that “Victory” is a simulation world that Frank created. It turns out that Jack knew everything, and it was he who imprisoned his wife in an illusory space. Under the terms of the deal with the project manager, the husbands take responsibility for their wives and immerse them in a simulation. In the real world, women’s bodies are in a kind of coma thanks to unusual lenses. The couple takes care of them. In addition, men are required to work for the Pobeda company, which is a payment for services.
Jack tries to convince Alice that he did everything for her own good and tries to keep her. But she breaks a glass on his head, after which the man falls dead. Frank receives a signal that Jack is dead and sends men in red uniforms to capture the heroine. An alarm sounds outside.
Bunny enters Alice’s house and asks the heroine to run away. Turns out the friend knows about the simulation. She voluntarily remains in the illusory world in order to be able to see the children who died in real life. Bunny explains that the death in the simulation implies a real death, so Alice should get out of here as soon as possible.
The heroine goes out into the street in a bloody dress. Looking at her, men begin to worry, and their wives begin to guess about the real state of things. So, Shelley, realizing that the time has come for a change, kills Frank, intending to take his place.
At the end, Alice gets into Jack’s car and, leaving the chase, gets to the dome on top of the mountain. Before taking the last step, she sees in her imagination Jack, who asks her to stay. But the heroine does not want to live in the illusion anymore, so she touches the transparent wall of the dome and exits the simulation.
“Don’t Worry, Darling” plot explained
So, the essence of the film “Don’t Worry, Darling” is quite simple: the heroine is freed from the “golden cage” in which her husband imprisoned her, setting an example for other women. Such an idea is quite in the spirit of the growing feminism. And it’s done pretty well.
The shown illusory world really embodies the vision of the role of a woman in the patriarchal world: her task there is to take care of her husband and do everything to make him happy. As a reward – the world of luxury, meetings with friends and other simple entertainment. At the same time, the true desires of the woman herself are completely ignored. Freed from captivity, the heroine confirms her right to choose the life she wants to live, including a career (remember that Alice worked as a surgeon in the past).
“Don’t Worry, Darling” also perfectly shows how, under the guise of love, men can take revenge on women. After all, Jack actually just compensated for his deplorable situation in the real world, in fact, by exchanging places with his wife in the illusory world. In the simulation, he created the appearance of success, only to amuse his ego, to subjugate his spouse to himself, making her his property.
If you try to look deeper and find some hidden meaning, you can do interpretations of individual designations and symbols of the film. For example, in the name of the project “Victory” you can see the assertion by men of their dominant position in relation to women. And, for example, a crashed plane (and Margaret’s child’s red toy airplane) can be interpreted as a symbol of a forgotten dream or one’s own desires.
However, the authors of “Don’t Worry, Darling” still didn’t scatter metaphors and allusions: the events shown are quite straightforward, everything else serves, rather, to maintain the atmosphere, the right mood. So a detailed analysis of the details is unlikely to be appropriate.
The disclosure of the obvious (and generally rather superficial) meaning of the painting “Don’t worry, dear”, which can be characterized by the phrases “You won’t be forced to be nice” and “A woman has the right to her life”, however, does not allow answering many questions that have arisen regarding the described peace. For example:
- How did Jack manage to “pull” Alice so easily from the real world, where she occupied an important place? After all, it is clear that in the real world women are not powerless at all. Did no one notice the disappearance of the girl?
- How exactly does the simulation work? Why did her defects manifest themselves in this way and not otherwise? For example, what kind of hallucinations in the form of black and white dancers? Or why do earthquakes happen?
- Why did the authors focus on the sedatives offered by Alice and Margaret? What’s the point of them if you can administer drugs in the real world?
- What exactly is the work of Jack and other men in the real world? But the heroines are asked this question throughout the whole picture and in the end they never get an answer to it.
- Why is Alice so quick to remember the real state of things, if she was recently subjected to severe shock therapy, precisely to erase her memory?
- Why is it so easy to exit the simulation (leave the city and go to the dome), and it is not protected in any way?
Alas, the authors of Don’t Worry Darling probably don’t know the answers either. Most likely, all these are just plot holes that everyone can try to fill on their own.
“Don’t Worry, Darling” ending explained
After the drama at the dinner table, Jack tricked Alice and handed her over to the men in red. She was taken to the hospital and tied to a bed. She was forced to undergo electroshock therapy. During treatment, she remembered a moment from her life before the Victory project. Jack lost his job and was worried; Alice comforted him by saying that she would take extra shifts to provide for them. She remembered working in the operating room. She was a doctor, and people around her called her “Dr. Wilson.” She returned home to Jack.
The hot water was not working and dinner had not yet been ordered. Jack clearly didn’t like Alice’s lifestyle. He wanted to spend more time with her, but she was very busy with work. When Alice went to her room to rest after a 30-hour shift, Jack listened to an audio tape that emphasized the importance of biological destiny. After electroshock treatment, she returned to the Pobeda project. Alice was greeted by Bunny, who was glad to have his friend back. But when Jack touched Alice’s lips, she remembered that touch from their past. Alice ignored this and went with Bunny to spend some time. Alice forgot the neighbors’ names due to shock, perhaps Bunny helped her remember.
Alice returned to her normal life, cooking dinner and cleaning the house. When Jack got home from work, she took the roast out of the oven, but froze when she heard him hum the song she’d been humming for a long time. Now she remembered where she had heard that song. She heard Jack sing it to her, but in a different reality. She remembered how she was drugged and carried away by Jack. They lived in a dilapidated apartment and the weather was cold. Jack agreed to the terms of Project Victory; it was a virtual project that hypnotized users and made them forget their reality and become part of a society controlled by men. Jack signed Alice into the program without her consent.
She was tied to her bed with her eyes kept open by a device that helped with hallucinations. When the men left for work in the morning, it essentially meant that they were going to the headquarters, through which they could exit the Victory project and return to the real world. They worked during these hours to bring home the money and food needed to maintain the project and their bodies, and returned to the project after the work day was over. The wives continued to hallucinate and lived in the Victory project, where they imagined that they were cleaning houses and preparing food. Alice felt pain in her body. She knew what was happening. She knew that the world they lived in was a fictional universe.
They worked during these hours to bring home the money and food needed to maintain the project and their bodies, and returned to the project after the work day was over. and returned to the project after the end of the working day. The wives continued to hallucinate and lived in the Victory project, where they imagined that they were cleaning houses and preparing food. Alice felt pain in her body. She knew what was happening. She knew that the world they lived in was a fictional universe. They worked during these hours to bring home the money and food needed to maintain the project and their bodies, and returned to the project after the work day was over. and returned to the project after the end of the working day.
The wives continued to hallucinate and lived in the Victory project, where they imagined that they were cleaning houses and preparing food. Alice felt pain in her body. She knew what was happening. She knew that the world they lived in was a fictional universe. They worked during these hours to bring home the money and food needed to maintain the project and their bodies, and returned to the project after the work day was over.
When she told Jack about this, he claimed to have saved her life. She always worked in the real world, and he gave her a life in which she could relax. Alice screamed that she wanted to work; she liked to work, and he took everything from her without even asking. Jack was devastated; he was always grateful to Frank for building a world where they could be what they deserved to be. Jack did not regret his action; he thought that what he did was for the best. When he couldn’t make his life work in reality, he decided to live in a fantasy world.
All the wives of the Victory project were trapped. Jack didn’t know the men who lived there. No one knew where they came from in the real world. Alice could no longer bear the truth. She hit Jack with a glass and he fell on top of her. Bunny entered their house; she asked Alice to leave immediately. Turns out, Bunny knew all about it. She told Alice that killing someone in the fictional world means they died in the real world too. Now that Jack is dead, Project Victory will come looking for Alice in the real world and kill her. Now she was a burden to them. Before leaving, Alice asked Bunny what she knew about it. Bunny explained that she chose to be here because she could be here with her children. In the real world, she lost her children, but here she was with them. Even though Alice tried to explain that the children weren’t real, Bunny wasn’t ready to give up her happy world. When Alice asks Bunny about the other women, she replies that none of them know the truth. They were all forced by their partners to live in a fictional world. that they died in the real world too.
Now that Jack is dead, Project Victory will come looking for Alice in the real world and kill her. Now she was a burden to them. Before leaving, Alice asked Bunny what she knew about it. Bunny explained that she chose to be here because she could be here with her children. In the real world, she lost her children, but here she was with them. Even though Alice tried to explain that the children weren’t real, Bunny wasn’t ready to give up her happy world. When Alice asks Bunny about the other women, she replies that none of them know the truth. They were all forced by their partners to live in a fictional world. that they died in the real world too. Now that Jack is dead, Project Victory will come looking for Alice in the real world and kill her.
Now she was a burden to them. Before leaving, Alice asked Bunny what she knew about it. Bunny explained that she chose to be here because she could be here with her children. In the real world, she lost her children, but here she was with them. Even though Alice tried to explain that the children weren’t real, Bunny wasn’t ready to give up her happy world. When Alice asks Bunny about the other women, she replies that none of them know the truth. They were all forced by their partners to live in a fictional world. Bunny explained that she chose to be here because she could be here with her children. In the real world, she lost her children, but here she was with them. Even though Alice tried to explain that the children weren’t real, Bunny wasn’t ready to give up her happy world. When Alice asks Bunny about the other women, she replies that none of them know the truth. They were all forced by their partners to live in a fictional world.
Bunny explained that she chose to be here because she could be here with her children. In the real world, she lost her children, but here she was with them. Even though Alice tried to explain that the children weren’t real, Bunny wasn’t ready to give up her happy world. When Alice asks Bunny about the other women, she replies that none of them know the truth. They were all forced by their partners to live in a fictional world.
When Alice left her house in her blood-soaked clothes, the men asked her to return to their house. The fictional world was thrown into turmoil as the women looked curiously at Alice. Her blood-soaked clothes disturbed them, and apparently they, too, began to remember fragments of their reality. Alice drove Jack’s car and headed for the headquarters. All the men of Project Victory followed Alice in their car.
They needed to stop her or she would destroy the perfect world they had built. Meanwhile, Frank was informed about Jack and Alice, but before he could take any action, Shelley stabbed him in the stomach. It can be assumed that she knew how problematic all this was, but she was too entangled in it to get out of it. She stayed in Frank’s good books to gain his trust. When Alice tried to escape, she found it the perfect opportunity to end him and find her freedom. There is little to no exploration of Shelley’s character in the film, and even at the end we don’t know her intentions or beliefs.
Alice’s car broke down as she drove up to the headquarters. She got out of the car and ran as fast as she could. She reached the headquarters, looked around and saw that the men were approaching her. Alice looked through the glass of the headquarters and was transported back to the real world. We didn’t see her wake up in the real world, but we heard her. Her sigh after escaping Project Victory explains that she has returned to her reality.
It can be assumed that Alice will wake up next to the dead Jack. Given that the head of the Victory Project, Frank, is dead, the fictional world will fall into complete chaos, and no one will focus on finding Alice in the real world. It is also important to remember that Project Victory was a small experiment with only 72 people. Therefore, a large impact on the real world is not to be expected. “Don’t Worry Darling” reminds us of the horror of being denied free rein. And how, if possible, misogynists would create a fictional world just to control women.
Although it’s extremely disappointing that Wilde barely explores the women in the film. We never had a chance to understand Violet, Shelly and Peg. Even though the characters had so much potential to contribute to a wider discussion.
