All Styles and No Substance
Two new films starring Harry Styles are now streaming on Amazon Prime and HBO Max respectively, and Veronica Phillips has thoughts on both.
If you follow us on Twitter, it’s clear that we think Harry Styles’ acting and line delivery is not good, if not meme-worthy when taking certain scenes out of context as below:
But how are the actual movies that Harry Styles star in? Fortunately for you and not so fortunate for Veronica, we reviewed Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and Michael Grandage’s My Policeman:
My Policeman is more interested in the brutalization and hatred of gay people, the emphasis of how bad it used to be back then, but works to absolve those who partake in this cruelty (a suggestion that maybe you, too, can be forgiven for actively ruining gay people’s lives. I’m not sure, really, it never becomes clear). All of this isn’t even all that traumatic to me, though, because the film totally fails to tap into any sort of emotional resonance; partially due to strange character choices, partially due to two interweaving storylines that fail to weave together, and partially due to a particularly stilted performance from Styles (who just isn’t ready for leading man status yet).
Don’t Worry Darling quickly became a film eclipsed by a real-life publicity mess. At the end of the day there is genuinely more to be said about the current state of how we handle believing women, toxic masculinity, and gender roles in the hesitant, drawn-out firing of alleged abuser Shia LaBeouf and the simultaneous bordering on misogynistic critique of Wilde (as many things can be true at once in conversations of sex and gender in Hollywood), than the film itself offers.
My Policeman starring Harry Styles, Emma Corrin and David Dawson is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Don't Worry Darling starring Florence Pugh and Harry Styles is now streaming on HBO Max.