Don’t Worry Darling review: As slick and dumb as Harry Styles promised

At the infamous Venice Film Festival press conference don’t worry darling, Pop Dreamboat and aspiring actor Harry Styles describes his new star vehicle: Feels like an authentic, theater-going movie. A clip of his co-star Chris Pine appears to lose his grip on reality while Styles says those words went viral, but it’s neither the first nor the last. don’t worry darling‘s cursed press tour — Styles found the butt of an internet joke.

The thing is, now that you’ve seen the movie, you know what Harry was talking about. don’t worry darlingDirected by Olivia Wilde, starring Florence Pugh For real teeth A movie to go to the cinema. It’s full of hot celebrities dressed in all white. It looks smooth and sounds big and enveloping. There’s a little sex, a little mystery, and a little action.It aims to take a big, silly idea and slam it into a cheap seat. It’s a bold, brassy, ​​high-concept studio thriller. think That’s what Harry was trying to say. )

In that context, the cyclone of gossip that preceded its release feels like part of, or at least matches, the experience: the decadent, lustrous tableau of millennial celebrity culture. , you can leave all mentions of scandals there.

don’t worry darling It’s set in a 1950s corporate idyll. Alice (Pew) and Jack (Stiles) are a bound young couple who live in a mid-century modular suburban paradise shaded by tall palm trees. All the women here are stay-at-home moms, and all the men work at a mysterious facility in the desert called the Victory Project. What they do there is a closely guarded secret. The leader of the project is a charismatic demon called Frank (Pine), a cult figure who speaks only in bland, non-specific maxims about their common purpose and utopian lifestyle.

Alice glides through this existence in a contented haze, enjoying Jack’s attention at home, sipping drinks with her cynical neighbor Bunny (Wild), and under the dispassionate gaze of Frank’s wife Sherry (Gema Chan). She practices ballet with another woman. A disturbed wife next door, an empty eggshell, an airplane falling from the sky. She is drawn to these imperfections, but no one else seems to notice her, her own attention is diverted, and her reality begins to collapse.

Not much seems to connect this glamorous, hyperreal, slightly sour psychological thriller with Wilde’s previous likable conscientiously luscious teen comedy. book smartBut behind both films you can sense a director with a strong, propulsive, and audience-pleasing instinct.With considerable studio resources behind her, it’s a rare pleasure to see a female director working in this populist register. queen, in theaters as well, hopefully it becomes a trend. )

Image: Warner Bros.

But Wilde’s willingness to head for the audience’s neck worked better for her in a ribald comedy than in a film working in an obscure mystery box mode. From the start, she loads her movies with very sharp visual tropes.Some of these are original and striking: Pugh being shoved against the plate-glass windows of perfect modernist homes, or smothered in plastic wrap. There are: those empty eggs, repeat marmot day Motifs of pouring coffee and sizzling bacon, Marilyn Monroe lookalikes hang out in giant cocktail glasses. None of them are subtle. Wilde begins disassembling Victory’s world before she finishes building it, and does so armed with her set of Hitchcock boxes taped to Hammer.

There’s no room for surprises or nuances as Alice gets closer to the truth of what’s happening to Victory’s wives. . Even if you don’t speculate on the exact nature of the Shyamalan-esque turn in the story, you know its contours and can sense where it’s going long before it arrives.

Perhaps there is outspoken honesty and even justified anger in this. It’s not a mystery at all if you’re asking what limits the If so, high-concept mystery thrillers were definitely the wrong medium for their message.

Image: Warner Bros.

So it proves. The final act of the film dissolves into a chaos of illogical, unsolvable, half-baked ideas.The filmmakers pull back the curtain and point her finger, but are unable to explain themselves and resolve the consequences (Wild hired her book smart Collaborator Katie Silverman will rework the original script by Carey and Shane Van Dyke. don’t worry darling It has all the characteristics of being overdeveloped. )

Oddly enough, the actor stuck by the film’s collapse isn’t Pugh, but Stiles. He doesn’t have the edge to say the least, but he looks very dashing and his boyish innocence works better with the film’s themes than you might think. In Victory, it’s not just women who are being manipulated. But as the conspiracy unfolds, he pitifully deflates. Below Harry Styles, there is nothing left.

It would be impossible to do that to Pugh. Alice may seem cryptic on the page, but on screen, Pugh’s rooted physicality and her bright, mischievous and stubborn sense of life are more real than real.she will not be denied and will show her power don’t worry darling Cross the finish line by force of will.

Pugh’s acting is enough of a recommendation to see this glossy, smoothly-finished film that feels like a movie. Musically, it combines richer, slightly edgier, crooning doo-wop and civilized jazz against John Powell’s erratic and unnerving score. In the space between these extravagant imagery and cacophony, you can feel the door opening to more troubling and provocative films. Wilde, desperate for one, nailed it.

don’t worry darling It hits theaters on September 23rd.