Whether you’re a fan of Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, or Chris Pine, or you’ve seen the movie headlined in recent celebrity drama, you’ve most likely heard of or watched the new movie Don’t Worry Darling. Originally released as a speculative screenplay by Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, and Katie Silberman in 2019, Don’t Worry Darling was officially directed and produced into a two-hour movie that was released in theaters on September 23, 2022. Despite the exciting build-up of Florence Pugh and Harry Styles working as co-stars, many viewers were let down by some aspects of the movie. Whether it was Harry Styles’ inexperienced acting, the confusing plot development, or just the knowledge of what happened between the cast members, it seems Don’t Worry Darling has received more backlash and negative reviews than I expected. However, I personally think the movie wasn’t that awful, and that some of the criticized aspects should be taken in with a more open mind. 

To start off, yes, some of Harry Styles’ acting could have been a little better, but before I critiqued his acting, I thought about how he doesn’t have much experience with acting for longer films. With this in mind, I don’t think his acting was the worst, and that isn’t just because I’m a fan of his music. Being that this is only Harry’s second major role in a movie, I think his level of acting was expected prior to watching Don’t Worry Darling. In my opinion, Harry actually exceeded my expectations because of what I had seen on social media. Between some of my friends and random people on my TikTok For You page, I mostly saw people saying Harry’s acting was terrible. However, after watching the movie for myself, I didn’t see any problem with Harry’s acting. 

Another criticism of Don’t Worry Darling was its plot line. I heard from many people that the plot was either confusing or weak. I somewhat agree with those statements because I was a little lost with what was going on until Florence Pugh’s character, Alice, had been confronted by Chris Pine’s character, Frank. At first, some of Alice’s hallucinations didn’t make sense to me either, but by the end of the movie, I understood most of the major scenes. Though I didn’t necessarily find the plot to be too extravagant, I did like the full circle that it made regarding Harry’s character, Jack, teaching Alice how to drive a car. As I was watching the final scenes of the movie, I made the connection that Jack was probably preparing for a scenario where Alice may need to drive off to escape Victory. There definitely were multiple weak spots in the plot development, but as the movie progressed, more scenes started to make sense to me. In fact, I would definitely rewatch the movie to try and catch small details that I didn’t notice the first time I saw the movie. 

During the production of the movie and after the premiere, members of the Don’t Worry Cast definitely stayed relevant in celebrity news headlines. Prior to the release of the movie the director, Olivia Wilde, was trending on social media on multiple occasions. Between firing Shia LaBeouf, who was originally supposed to play Jack Chambers, to replacing LaBeouf with Harry Styles and then publicly announcing a relationship with Styles, Wilde has definitely sparked some controversy. Closer to the movie premier it was then revealed that Shia LaBeouf wasn’t fired and that he had quit. This was in addition to the rumors that Florence Pugh and Olivia Wilde had feuds during the filming of the movie. This then panned out to Pugh putting a limit on how involved she would be in the promotion of Don’t Worry Darling and stating that she wouldn’t attend the premier in New York. Many supporters of Pugh have also hated on Wilde for making Harry Styles the face of the movie and underappreciating Florence Pugh and her character. Whether Olivia Wilde used Harry Styles as a publicity stunt to bring in more views or not is up to you to decide. 

In the end, regardless of all of the criticism and drama, I believe you should give the movie a chance and see it in theaters if you haven’t already!