Controversy surrounds ‘Don’t worry, dear’, but that doesn’t stop it from being a remarkable piece of social science fiction.

All the defects that you hear attributed to ‘Don’t worry, dear’, which hits theaters today, are true. His two hours could have used some conciseness and a cut of twenty minutes of footage. Some actors, especially Harry Styles, pale next to the extraordinary work of Florence Pugh. Y the film is the victim of a continuous buzz for gossip devotees and that is playing against it because it is gaining fame as a very expensive slow-motion traffic accident.

All this is true because it is clear that ‘Don’t worry, dear’ is an irregular film. Even lower than the previous and very remarkable youth comedy by Olivia Wilde, ‘Super nerds’, an honest, simple wonder with emotions on the surface. However, it is easy to find values ​​in ‘Don’t worry, my dear’ because it has ideas in abundance and above all, it confirms that Wilde has a personal and unique vision that should be pampered.

It’s difficult to get into what account ‘Don’t worry, dear’ or what referents of the genre it quotes without stepping on the mines of spoilers, but only with the approach, there is an unequivocal classic that reminds you: ‘The possessed of Stepford’, the sensational novel by Ira Levin which was adapted to the cinema in a very classic 1975 film with the title in Spanish ‘The women of Stepford’ and which had a new and fun version in 2004 at the hands of Frank Oz, ‘The perfect women’.

That last one, in fact, is a title that would fit like a glove to this apocryphal version of the same story, in which a housewife in the fifties (Pugh) lives with her husband (Styles) in an apparently idyllic experimental community led by a charismatic leader (Chris Pine). Every day her husband leaves for a job of capital importance and absolutely secret, but the woman begins to suspect that under so much happiness in pastel colors there are somewhat obscure details.

Something smells bad in residential areas

Perhaps the great problem of ‘Don’t worry, dear’, above all the previous ones, is an excessive ambition that leads him to bring together a series of messages against the traditional family, toxic masculinity, a supposedly ideal historical past and even salaried work. And all this, stealing elements from ‘The Matrix’, ‘The Truman Show’, the recent ‘Let Me Out’ in the tone of a lost episode of ‘Twilight Zone’, and the aforementioned ‘The Stepford Women’.

That makes the result has a tone that wanders too much between references and morals that do not finish curdling, and which leads to a final section as grasped as it is full of suggestive ideas (the secret behind the whole film makes only half sense, but at the same time it is brimming with glorious ideas about the role of men in a society of emancipated women) . Perhaps some restraint would have been good for the script by Katie Silberman, also the author of ‘Super Nerds’, although the excess is, in a sense, also part of the message. The final experience is undoubtedly positive, and at the same time undeniably bittersweet.

However, the film is visually exuberant. It is full of clues, of double meanings, of an inventiveness that makes it clear that Wilde is a creator with a visual world that is worth knowing, beyond the gossip. The staging is a succession of discoveries both in the most nightmarish and surreal sequences and throughout the final part, which connects the film with the cinema of apocalyptic desolation (interior and exterior) of the seventies.

And above all, a glorious Florence Pugh very well directed and manages to make credible a role that is constantly balancing between the hallucinatory and the melodramatic. She is the one that sustains all the visual scaffolding and the machine gun of messages of a film that is not absolutely round but unquestionably more suggestive than the bulk of the genre cinema that reaches our screens.