Don't Worry Darling was the most-talked about movie of 2022, and it's now arrived on Netflix US if you fancy a rewatch or just want to see what the fuss is about.
Olivia Wilde's thriller is set in a seemingly idyllic neighbourhood called Victory, run by the enigmatic Frank (Chris Pine), but one resident, Alice (Florence Pugh), starts to suspect that not all is right in her perfect life with husband Jack (Harry Styles).
Don't Worry Darling will certainly leave you with plenty of questions (including what the hell that plane is), but we're going to focus on its big twist here to explain any lingering questions you might have.
Needless to say, there are major spoilers ahead if you haven't seen Don't Worry Darling yet.
Don't Worry Darling explained: What's happening in Victory?
Alice's journey into discovering Victory isn't quite what it seems is foreshadowed by her friend Margaret's similar descent into seeming-madness, having wandered into the desert beyond the borders of their town of Victory.
Victory is led by the enigmatic Frank (Chris Pine) who recites sermons over the radio every morning to the wives who stay at home, while the husbands go to work at Victory's plant creating "progressive materials" – whatever that means.
After witnessing an aeroplane crash in the desert (much like Margaret saw her son's red plane toy in the desert), Alice too wanders out beyond the bounds of town to find the plane but instead discovers and finds a dome-like building and when she touches it she begins to truly see the illusion for what it is.
Frank and his minions – and Alice's own husband Jack (Harry Styles) – do everything in their power to get Alice to recant her rambling, including prescribing her meds which she refuses to take (and in his one moment of support, Jack sides with his wife on remaining unmedicated).
To try and survive, Alice pretends she's fine and they attend a party at which Jack is given a promotion; this sets Alice into a panic and she confides in Bunny about what she has seen, but Bunny tells her to get her shit together.
Alice comes up with a plan and invites Frank, his wife Shelly (Gemma Chan), as well as their neighbours (but not Bunny!) to dinner where she confronts them all with the lies that she has discovered: all of them are fed one of three origin stories.
The women are all from Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Chicago, the couples all met in one of three ways and all honeymooned in one of three locations.
She fails to convince her guests of Frank's control over them and the illusionary world he's made, and they leave. She begs Jack to flee and he agrees, but as they get in the car the men in red coats, take her away to receive electroshock therapy.
While undergoing the treatment, she remembers the truth. She is really a surgeon living in the 21st century with a down-and-out boyfriend (Styles given some bad skin and greasy hair) who loses his job.
What we are treated to as an audience is that Jack, during his unemployed internet perusal, discovered a YouTube channel of sorts led by Frank in which he galvanises other people to effectively entrap their partners and set them up in a Matrix-like machine.
The 'knowing' partners are tasked with keeping their partners' bodies alive – which also necessitates a lot of questions that are never answered in the movie which we don't have time to get into here – but mainly we'd like to know HOW, given the extensive work that is gone into the same task in fully functioning hospitals with staffs of hundreds.
Anyway, these partners including Jack are also in the machine but 'leave' Victory to go back to the real world and work to make up the money it cost to undergo the procedure, as it were. (Though why Jack couldn't get whatever job this is in the first place is a lingering, nagging question.)
Unfortunately, Alice doesn't remember any of that when she returns to Victory – that is, until she hears Jack humming a song that they used to know in the 'real' world and her memories come flooding back.
And it's the moment that kicks Don't Worry Darling into its big finale.
Don't Worry Darling ending: Did Alice survive?
In the confrontation between her and Jack, she kills him; Bunny discovers them and as Alice tries to tell her the truth, Bunny reveals that she in fact knows this all is true and that she and her husband live there voluntarily so she can be with her children (who died in the real world). She urges Alice to flee or else Frank and his minions will kill her.
Except, surprise, an annoyed Shelly kills Frank! Still, the men in red coats are after Alice who steals a car and drives through the desert to the dome-like building. She presses her hands on the glass doors and the screen goes black; she gasps, and the movie ends.
Is she alive? Does she wake up, her body emaciated and weak, strapped to her bed next to the corpse of her once-beloved husband? It seems to be the case, but all of this is left open to how positive you're feeling.
We're also left no clearer about whether the plane Alice saw was real (nobody else seemed to notice), what happens to any woman who dies in Victory (apparently only men die in the real world) and what's next for Victory after Frank's death.
In the original script for Don't Worry Darling, there were some major differences with how the story played out, including a less ambiguous ending where it was made clear that Alice survived and made it out into the real world.
But given the changes, we can't take it for granted that this is exactly what happened in the movie, so it's up to you to make your own mind up whether Alice is now alive and free or just doomed to eventually starve to death next to her dead husband.
We prefer the former for obvious reasons, but that's up to you.
Don't Worry Darling is available to buy from Prime Video, iTunes, Microsoft Store and other digital retailers in the UK, as well as being available to watch on Netflix in the US.
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