Don't Worry Darling · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The picture window. Every house in Victory has one, and Matthew Libatique shoots them like they're the reason to live there: desert light, a clean horizon, a pool the color of chlorine and money. Later Alice is pressed against glass with the frame tightening on her, and the window is doing the other thing a window does. Nothing about the object has changed. What changed is which side of it she's on.

Gilles Deleuze spent much of his second cinema book on images where you can't separate a thing from its double. He called them crystal-images. It isn't a fancy word for "confusing." It names a structure: the actual thing and its virtual double, reflection or memory or the version of it that isn't here, trade places so fast that neither one gets to be the original. Mirrors do this. So, it turns out, does a company town.

Deleuze sorted crystals by how they behave, and the one he called perfect is the sealed mirrored world with no outside — his example was Ophüls. Victory is about as literal a version as anyone has built. The layout is radial. The desert is the wall. At the center sits the one place everyone is instructed not to approach, and the film's whole spatial dread runs off that instruction. Katie Byron's design and Arianne Phillips's costumes aren't decorating this idea, they are the idea: every surface in Victory is either reflective or immaculate, which comes to the same thing. A world with no dirt is a world with no evidence.

Deleuze also separates two kinds of offscreen space, and the film stages the distinction as a plot. Relative out-of-field is the next room; the camera could pan there anytime. Absolute out-of-field is a beyond that the film's space can't contain at all. The Victory Project starts as the first kind, just over that ridge, a drive away. The reveal converts it into the second: it was never in this geography, because this geography isn't a place. That's a genuinely elegant move for a thriller — turning a theoretical distinction into a twist.

Watch the ordinary objects. Deleuze, borrowing from Peirce, calls an object a mark when it means something by habit: ice in the glass, the men leaving at the same hour each morning, cocktail hour on schedule. See the sign, expect what follows. Victory is a machine for manufacturing marks. Its suspense runs on demarks, objects that fall out of their customary chain and force you to interpret instead of recognize. The eggs the film keeps returning to. A humming tune Alice can't stop repeating that belongs to no radio in this world and turns out to be a key. And Margaret, whose breakdown is the first thing in Victory that won't go back in its box. Affonso Gonçalves splices the fragments into the domestic rhythm — an eye, a geometric pattern, a cracking shell — so they land as glitches before the plot has any use for them. That's the right order. You feel the wrongness before you can name it, exactly as she does.

The intrusions themselves, those kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley formations of mirrored dancers, matter most for what the film refuses to make them. A flashback would date them: this happened, then, to her. Deleuze calls that a recollection-image, and it's the safe option. These have no address in time. His word for an image circulating free of any locatable memory is the onirosign, the dream-image, and leaving the dancers unanchored is the smartest formal decision in the movie. The other life doesn't come back as testimony. It presses on this one as pattern.

Then the genre engine. The gaslight thriller, from Gaslight in 1944 through Rosemary's Baby, runs on a specific cruelty: a woman perceives correctly, her perception is reframed as illness, and the film locks us inside her doubted point of view so we have nothing to check her against. Deleuze called this whole territory the powers of the false, and the precise node is falsifying narration — two accounts that can't both be true, both fully furnished, neither able to defeat the other from inside the film. It bites because cinema's oldest working assumption is that the image is a witness. You saw it, so it happened. Frank is what Deleuze calls the forger: not a man who lies about a world but one who manufactures it, and Chris Pine plays him with the easy warmth of someone who believes he's selling an upgrade.

And the bodies. Deleuze uses gest for a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone having to state it. The wives at the ballet barre, drilled in unison, is a gest — domesticity as choreography, ideology installed as muscle memory. Wilde's best reversal is that the same trained body is where the truth leaks. The showgirl vocabulary tied to Alice's suppressed memory means the discipline and the escape route are the same movement.

So what's Wilde's own? Not the simulated-idyll reveal; The Truman Show built the sunlit authored town and The Matrix supplied the glitch cues that leak the truth to protagonist and viewer at once. Not the planned community whose perfect domesticity is engineered compliance — that's Stepford. Not even the 1950s-surface-versus-present-anxiety collision, which Pleasantville had already turned into a critique of a repressive gender order. Her contribution is to make the production design the antagonist. Victory is shot as advertising: Slim Aarons poolside society photography, the Mad Men revival of period glamour, desert light rendered as luxury. The seduction of the image is the mechanism of capture, which means the film needs you to want Victory before it can indict the wanting. Underneath that sits the sharpest choice in the production: the simulation was shot in real Palm Springs modernist houses. Actual mid-century architecture, not a built set. Deleuze calls a description crystalline when it composes its object and then replaces it — the description doesn't point back at something already there, it stands in for it. That happens twice here. The fifties were already selling a fantasy of themselves; Victory is a fantasy of that fantasy, assembled from the surviving real estate. There is no original at the bottom of the stack. Which is, not incidentally, an argument about what the manosphere is nostalgic for.

Where it strains is the last half hour. For most of its length the film keeps Alice in what Deleuze calls a pure optical situation: she sees, she can't act, and any action she does take gets converted into further proof of her instability. Then the film hands her a car and a road. That's the action-image in its classical large form, a global situation pressing until one decisive act transforms it, and it's the oldest engine in the medium, restarted at the exact moment the crystal was most interesting. The crystal does crack, and a crack is a real event in Deleuze — the fissure, the line of flight out of a totality that looked sealed. It also lets the movie off a hook it spent an hour building. Critics divided along roughly this seam, and the division is fair. Florence Pugh's performance is the part almost nobody argues about, and she is carrying scenes whose writing can't always meet her.

What it seeded isn't legible yet, and the reason is odd enough to state plainly: the noise around the production swallowed the reception of the film. A movie about a woman whose account of reality is disbelieved was released into a press cycle occupied with adjudicating whose account of a set was true. That isn't a reading of the film. It's a fact about the room it opened in, and part of why the thing itself hasn't been looked at carefully.

So look again, and watch the surfaces. Count how often something appears reflected before it appears directly. Track the marks — the ice, the departures, the schedule — and find the exact frame where one falls out of line. And keep one question open, because the film doesn't close it: when Libatique gives you that flawless poolside composition, whose pleasure is it? The men who built Victory are supposed to own that image. The camera clearly loves it too. Whether the film is dismantling the seduction or administering another dose is the argument worth having, and it's why the movie is more alive than its reputation.