Editor's note: This article contains spoilers for Don't Worry Darling.
Olivia Wilde’s sophomore venture into directing, the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling, premiered last Friday among wild behind-the-scenes stories and alleged feuds between cast members. However, according to critics, the movie itself fails to intrigue as much as its offscreen stories: it currently sits at a 38% approval rate at RottenTomatoes. The story follows Alice (Florence Pugh), a housewife who seems to live in a perfect world with her perfect husband Jack (Harry Styles), but where everything changes when she starts noticing there’s something wrong in her suburban neighborhood.
Critics agree that Don’t Worry Darling spends too much time unpacking the mysteries of the Victory Project, only to give rushed explanations and a cliffhanger ending that doesn’t help the movie to establish the critique it was going for. But the story wasn’t always like this. It’s common that scripts change as the production of a movie develops, but as Insider reveals, Don’t Worry Darling eliminated some original final moments that would have made the story a lot clearer.
In the movie that people saw on the big screen, Alice is submitted to shock therapy after asking too many questions, and then we learn that she’s living in a Matrix-like reality in which modern-world men trap their wives so they can have an idyllic life for themselves, whether the wives like it or not. The idea is that these men think society has evolved too much, and men aren’t happy with the fact that women are no longer concerned with being the perfect wife — in the real world, Alice was once a doctor, while Jack was actually an American, not a Brit, who was between jobs.
The original treatment for Don’t Worry Darling was written by Carey and Shane Van Dyke, and it ended up on the 2019 Black List – a list of the best screenplays written in the year which were were never picked up to start production. After Wilde was drawn to it, she hired Katie Silberman (Booksmart) to do a rewrite that gave the female characters more agency and presence in the story, as well as added the Victory Project's cult-like leader, Frank (Chris Pine), to the story.
In both versions, Alice is unwillingly connected to a simulated 1950s reality, and she also manages to get a glimpse at what real life looks and feels like. However, in the original version, the concept is more fleshed out. Alice discovers her husband Jack faked her death in order to join a program in which women are no longer entitled to a career. Then they both exit the simulation, but Alice is forced back into it. In the original ending, Alice tries to convince everyone they’re living in a fake world and ends up committed to a psychiatric hospital. A spark of hope is presented when Bunny (Wilde) visits Alice and tells her there is an exit portal in the psychiatric ward, and Alice starts moving slowly to it.
Don’t Worry Darling is now playing in theaters. You can read the full account of the original script in the Insider website, and you can watch the trailer below: