Movies like Don't Worry Darling

Why it's similar — Juel Taylor's 2023 sci-fi mystery shares Don't Worry Darling's central conceit — a community where the perfect surface is the cover for the experiment underneath it — and operates in the same hybrid genre register, mixing satire and conspiracy thriller. The rhyme is the use of an idealised mid-century-American mise-en-scène as the diegetic-level disguise for a much darker contemporary experiment.

Why it's similar — David Jacobson's 2005 Edward Norton drama shares Wilde's interest in characters whose identities are explicitly constructed against a fantasy of an earlier American era — here, the cowboy western — and uses the same desert-California landscape to externalise that nostalgia as a kind of mental illness. Both films treat the impulse to live inside a mid-century iconography as the symptom rather than the cure.

Why it's similar — Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.'s 2020 Blumhouse thriller is built on the same suspicion Wilde works with — that a character's memory of their own life is being managed by someone with a clinical or technological interest in that management — and pays off the suspicion with the same kind of identity-recovery climax. Both films use memory as the genre's central battleground rather than as backstory.

Why it's similar — Brian Yuzna's 1989 Beverly Hills body-horror satire works in the same key as Don't Worry Darling — an immaculate upper-middle-class community is in fact running on a hidden infrastructure of exploitation, and the protagonist's gradual realisation of the truth is staged as both class allegory and physical horror. The rhyme is the conviction that affluent surfaces are exactly the place horror should be staged.

Why it's similar — Courteney Cox's 2014 directorial debut is the smaller suburban-malaise cousin of Don't Worry Darling — a study of how meticulously-maintained American domesticity can become its own form of dissociation. The rhyme is less plot than tonal: both films are interested in the precise moment a character notices that the life they have been living is not the life they thought they were inside.