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

At the Venice Film Festival press conference Don’t Worry Darling, pop dreamboat and aspirant actor Harry Styles described his new star vehicle thus: “My favorite thing about the movie is, like, it feels like a… like a movie. It feels like a real, you know, go-to-the-theater film movie.” A clip of his co-star Chris Pine appearing to lose his grip on reality while Styles said these words went viral, and — not for the first, or last, time in Don’t Worry Darling’s cursed press tour — Styles found himself the butt of the internet’s jokes.

The truth is that Harry’s words are clearer now that I’ve seen it. Don’t Worry DarlingThe film, directed and starring Florence Pugh by Olivia Wilde, is also available on DVD. Really It isThis is a movie for the theatre. It’s full of hot famous people wearing immaculate clothes. The sound is loud and full of life. It’s got a little bit of sex, a little bit of mystery, and a little bit of action. The movie is a giant swing at a dumb idea and attempts to make it all go down in the poor seats. It’s not very clever and not wholly successful, but it is the kind of bold, brassy, high-concept studio thriller we don’t get so often these days. At least I was able to. Think that’s what Harry was trying to say.)

In that context, the cyclone of gossip that has preceded its release feels like part of the experience, or at least consistent with it: a decadent, glossy tableau of turn-of-the-millennium celebrity culture. But, the scandal can be left out. If there were troubles on set or discord among the cast, it doesn’t show in the finished product, which is slick, and conspicuously well made — if not well thought out.

Warner Bros.

Don’t Worry Darling The film is set in the 1950s corporate utopia. Alice (Pugh), and Jack Styles are an infatuated young couple who live in a mid-century suburb paradise surrounded by palm trees. The Victory Project is a secret facility in the desert that employs all of the men. All women are homemakers. What they do there is a closely guarded secret; the project’s leader is a charismatic devil called Frank (Pine), a cultish figure who speaks only in bland, nonspecific aphorisms about their common cause and utopian lifestyle.

Alice glides through this existence in a contented haze, enjoying Jack’s attentions at home, sipping drinks with her sardonic neighbor Bunny (Wilde), and practicing ballet with the other women under the cool gaze of Frank’s wife, Shelley (Gemma Chan). But she can’t help noticing cracks in the facade of this perfect world — a disturbed wife in the house next door, an empty eggshell, a plane falling out of the sky. She’s drawn to these imperfections, but nobody else seems to notice, her own attention slips, and her reality starts to fracture.

There doesn’t seem to be much linking this glamorous, hyper-real, rather sour psychological thriller with Wilde’s previous film, the likable and conscientiously sweet teen comedy Booksmart. But behind both films you can sense a director with strong, propulsive, crowd-pleasing instincts, who likes to go big and doesn’t have much time for shades of gray. That’s no kind of dis — it’s an all-too-rare pleasure to see a female director working in this populist register, with considerable studio resources behind her. (Gina Prince-Bythewood’s muscular The Queen of WomenIt is also available in theatres.

Warner Bros.

But Wilde’s willingness to go for the audience’s jugular served her better with a ribald comedy than it does in a film working in an ambiguous, mystery-box mode. She starts the movie with a lot of very pointed metaphors. Pugh is pressed against the glass plates of her modernist house, while plastic wrap covers her body. Some of these are clichéd and irritatingly obvious: the empty eggs. Groundhog Day The Marilyn Monroe-like Marilyn Monroe looks like she is sizzling bacon and pouring coffee, while sizzling coffee in the background. All of these are not subtle. Wilde starts deconstructing the world of Victory before she’s finished building it, and she does it armed with a Hitchcock box set taped to a sledgehammer.

There’s no room for surprise or nuance as Alice circles closer to the truth of what’s happening to the wives of Victory. It’s not what it seems and it isn’t as simple as you think. Even a movie-literate person can still see the truth. Even if you don’t guess the exact nature of the Shyamalan-esque turn in the narrative, you’ll know its contours, and sense where it’s headed, long before it arrives.

Maybe there’s a forthright honesty to this — even a justified anger. After all, if you’re asking what keeps women bound to an unfulfilling fantasy of becalmed domesticity, what force constrains their personhood, then it’s really no mystery at all. Maybe pretending otherwise just to give the story a satisfying twist is its own version of gaslighting. But if that’s the case, then a high-concept mystery thriller was surely the wrong medium for the message.

Warner Bros.

This is what it does. The film’s final act dissolves into a mess of illogic, irresolution, and half-formed ideas. The filmmakers pull back the curtain and point the finger, but can’t quite manage — or can’t quite be bothered — to explain themselves and to work out the consequences. (Wilde hired her BooksmartKatie Silberman, Carey’s collaborator, will rewrite the original script of Shane Van Dyke and Carey. Don’t Worry DarlingIt has the appearance of being too developed.

Oddly enough, the actor who’s stranded by the film’s collapse is not Pugh, but Styles. He’s not the disaster some gleefully predicted. He has no edge to speak of, but he looks very dashing, and his boyish artlessness works better with the film’s themes than you might think; in Victory, the women aren’t the only ones being manipulated. But as the plot unspools, he deflates pathetically; under the Harry Styles of it all, there’s nothing left.

Pugh could not do this. Alice may be just as much of a cipher on the page, but on screen, Pugh’s rooted physicality and radiant, mischievous, stubborn sense of life are realer than real. Pugh will not allow her to be denied. Don’t Worry Darling Through sheer willpower, we crossed the finish line.

Pugh’s performance is enough of a recommendation to see this shiny, smoothly finished movie-that-feels-like-a-movie. Pugh’s performance is a highlight of the movie. The costuming and cinematography are stunning, as well as the production design. Musically, it’s even richer and a little edgier, pitting crooning doo-wop and civilized jazz against John Powell’s unsettling, nervy score. You can sense a way to get into a more complex, provocative movie in the spaces between these beautiful images and discordant sound effects. Wilde was determined to get the message across and has made it clear.

Don’t Worry DarlingOpening in Theaters: Sept. 23,