Don’t Worry Darling is a fine idea for a episode of mystery suspense sci-fi tv show… but it’s stretched to two hours of often uneventful, static storytelling. Cut this back by a good hour or insert more breadcrumbs and they might have had something good.

The flick is set in an idyllic 1950s neighborhood where the woman make the home and the men head off every morning to work at the mysterious Victory project. But, of course, not everything is at it seems and slowly our lead (played by Florence Pugh) starts noticing things aren’t quite right.

Hard to talk about without revealing what’s really going on… but there’s obviously something really going on. It’s a mystery box where we have to deduce what’s likely happening based on the visual clues and hints provided. This is the kind of story that lives and dies based on how the truth reveals itself. And that’s where this movie goes off the rails.

At first, we get some hints that should make any observant person get an inkling about the overall theme, if not the actual mechanism of this mystery. And then we get some visual clues and cryptic revelations that were pretty enticing. I was engaged and enticed.

But this film simply stops providing hints or clues until then last twenty minutes of the final act. And that’s a lot of down-time watching Pugh be confused and paranoid without any additional hints for the audience. I simply got deeply, deeply bored… the acting is fine but the characters don’t really have a lot to say beyond accusations and cryptic replies. This kind of enclosed mystery thriller needs more meat to its mystery than this film provided.

The final reveal and finale at least provided a little interest from me to see how it resolves. That helped the movie’s heartbeat just enough to give it a slightly better rating than I thought I was going to give it. That said though, I kept waiting for something more interesting to happen. Something that would give more agency and maybe a lot more catharsis.

Plus the flick ends where it would start getting interesting.

No, this one’s quite a disappointment. There’s merit in some of the acting and I enjoyed, at the beginning, trying to deduce the mystery. But the longer the movie goes without feeding the audience, the more it lost me. There’s a better version of this story out there.

Score: 71