If the unending messiness of Don’t Worry Darling promotional tour has left you with a dozen (understandably) haunting questions — At what point did director Olivia Wilde fire Shia LaBoeuf? Did Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine in Venice? — and you were hoping for neater resolutions within the movie itself, you’re out of luck. The film, a mashup of The Stepford Wives (1975), The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999), relies on vivid imagery that it never explains, character motivations it can’t justify and motifs that just don’t cohere in the larger scheme of things.
Spoilers for Don’t Worry Darling follow:
By the end of the film, it’s revealed that Alice (Florence Pugh), a doting housewife living in the Fifties town of Victory, is actually part of a simulation. In the real (modern) world, her boyfriend Jack (Harry Styles), frustrated by her long work hours and heavily influenced by redpill podcasts, has abducted and trapped her in this virtual reality. While the men in Victory enter and exit at will, their wives are bound to the game, subservient to their husbands. They have no memory of their lives before and no way of knowing their existence is an illusion. Alice breaks free by the end, but not without leaving the audience with a whole bunch of unanswered questions. Here’s everything you’re probably still worrying about:
What’s up with the hollow eggs?
One of the first signs that not all is right in the tastefully curated, well-manicured suburbia of Victory appear via the eggs Alice cooks for breakfast every day. Early in the film, she picks one up from the carton as usual, but then pauses to weigh it in the palm of her hand, her expression suggesting a wary unfamiliarity. When she squeezes harder, it crumbles to dust, hollow inside. Is this a glitch in the code? One theory suggests that if the eggs are taken as a symbol of fertility, their hollowness foreshadows how none of the children in Victory are real but simply programmed simulations, but this feels like a too-nuanced explanation for a film that far too often resorts to bluntness.
The illusion of Alice’s perfect home life gradually begins to crumble in other frightening ways — the walls close in on her, a reflection in her bathroom mirror moves independently — and while these scenes heighten her terror (and by extension, her desire to find out more) and nudge at the audience’s interest, there’s no real explanation for why they occur in the first place. The film frequently confuses arresting imagery for narrative sustenance, the cinematic equivalent of: No thoughts, just vibes.