This is a spoiler from the start, like from now, so don’t read until you’ve seen the movie. You’ve been warned.
Every movie has its rules and the one rule that’s made abundantly clear at the end of Don’t Worry Darling, is that if a person is killed in “Victory” (the simulation), their body dies in the real world. When Florence Pugh accidentally kills her husband in the simulation there begins a high speed chase because she’s got to run to that central mound and press her hands against the windows in order to “wake up.” Because of the nature of the film and the basic premise (that women are being enslaved through ‘real world’ eye hypnosis and other horseshit), we think throughout the movie that ALL the women are enslaved and trapped in their beds like Florence Pugh and her neighbor.
But almost toward the end, the wife of the “guru” played by Chris Pine (I think his name was Frank), is stabbed and killed by his wife. This means that she knows he will die in the real world and she doesn’t care. So either she leaves every day, like all the dutiful husbands who pretend to go to work, OR, she has the ability to wake herself up, OR, there are people attending to her body as she exists in the fictional virtual world of Victory. There’s a possibility that she has committed murder, like Pugh, against the man who is feeding her body in the real world. And there’s also a possibility that Frank (if that’s his name) is the one trapped in the bed. (I don’t think this is likely because we hear when we are in the real world Harry Styles listening to him talk on the radio.) But she says, “It’s time for a woman to take over” and she also seems to know about the rules of the world.
I was glad I didn’t think about this too much — like I said, it just occurred to me. But it strikes me as an interesting take on marriage and relationships. Whether or not you know you’re in a simulation, you will still keep acting like a human being, with desires, but much more jealousy, envy, disappointment, and all those other deadly sins.