• Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling received a 5-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.
• Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Gemma Chan, and more attended the film’s premiere.
• Reviewer called it a “candy-coated psychological thriller” about men controlling women’s bodies.

Olivia Wilde’s film Don’t Worry Darling received a 5-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival 2022.

Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, and Florence Pugh – who arrived late from the Dune 2 set in Budapest – attended the film’s premiere. The Little Women star was greeted warmly as she walked down the red carpet in a glittering outfit.

The premise of the film follows the residents of Victory Project Headquarters, a 1960s Palm Springs mid-century complex surrounded by foreboding desert mountains. This is a planned town constructed by a secretive organisation with a vaguely messianic aim to promote humanity… in some way. Each morning, the males, all gorgeous, go to work, while the women, all pretty, care after the kids or sip afternoon cocktails with neighbour wives. (Alternatively, they do both.) There’s an alarming hum beneath all this sozzled good-living, the notion that nothing this flawlessly secure and uniformly delightful could really be true.

The Deadline’s Pete Hammond called Wilde’s film a “candy-coated psychological thriller” about “the terror imposed by men controlling women’s bodies.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson reviews, “Once the film starts showing its cards, it hurries to its climax and conclusion, complete with an unconvincing car chase and a murder. What energy the movie had has been sapped. It staggers across the finish line as it asks us to consider something profound.”

Whereas, Variety’s Clayton Davis feels that the movie is “isn’t a major Oscar contender”.