Home Viewing Review: Ingrid Goes West

Ingrid Goes West

(2017. Director: Matt Spicer Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O'Shea Jackson Jr, Billy Magnussen)

SYNOPSIS:

After being released from a mental hospital, shortly after the death of her mother, Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) travels to L.A. to start a new life by insinuating herself into the life of a young online celebrity she has begun stalking.

There are few emotions the cinema understands better than desperation.

We live in a time when major studios are trying to latch onto any trend which might appeal to a growing youthful audience that they simply do not understand. They are desolately grasping for any form of Intellectual Property to form a basis for their latest movie (sorry 'product' ...sorry 'franchise'). Having already started scraping the barrel for adaptions of computer games (Angry Birds, really?), board games (Battleship? Come on) toys (wait, they made a Bratz movie?!) and even, dear god, Emoji, it was only a matter of time until the film industry decides to take on it's biggest rival in the fight for our eyes and ears, social media.

When the official Facebook movie is finally made it will probably focus more on the warm relationships built online than on crushed friendships like that of its founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin (as featured in David Fincher's caustic biopic The Social Network.) When Twitter gets it's full 90 minutes to express itself, it will no doubt shy away from discussing it's creator Jack Dorsey's disturbing habit of not only allowing neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to organise on the site, but treating them like celebrities worthy of special verification. And when Instagram finally expands its vistas to the big screen it will probably end up being as artificially crafted and filtered into perfection as its users try to be. It needn't bother. The perfect Instagram movie has already been made. It's called Ingrid Goes West.

Ingrid Goes West is the story of a troubled young woman named Ingrid Thorburn, played with awkward perfection by Aubrey Plaza. We first see Ingrid as she gatecrashes the wedding of a woman she hardly knows, but obsesses over online, in a fury at her lack of invite to the event. Ingrid is clearly not a mentally healthy protagonist. Plaza, who is best known for playing the endearingly sardonic April Ludgate on the excellent sitcom Parks And Recreation, is a perfect fit for the role. She begins the film with a seemingly emotionless poker-face, but we see the light in her eyes briefly sparkle as soon as, once released from a mental institution, she is finally reunited with her phone and her only connection with what she perceives to be the outside world. It doesn't take long before she discovers a new person to stalk endlessly and, after receiving a large inheritance payment, she is quickly on her way to L.A. in order to track down her prey.

Her target is Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman who has made a successful career as a social media 'influencer.' (i.e. She's a minor celebrity who is paid to endorse overpriced products while portraying her own life as some sort of perfection which others should aim to attain.) Her husband, Ezra (Wyatt Russell), is slightly more down-to-Earth and, at least, recognises the artifice on which their world is built. That said, he is almost as delusional as her, expecting to make a living from some truly terrible, inane stencil art. The pair of them feel like every patronising newspaper article on 'Millennials' come to life: ranging from the unfairly negative thinkpieces about a generation who supposedly value their kale smoothies and avocado toast more than they do security and sustainability, to the reverent biographic articles on 'self-made' media darlings which conveniently fail to mention that these 'self-made' fortunes almost always required extensive parental loans and favours from wealthy 'friends' to get kickstarted. Russell and, especially, Olsen are well cast, instantly creating an atmosphere of charming affability, mixed with the oblivious cluelessness of those simply incapable of understanding that other people exist outside of their world of all encompassing privilege (where self worth can be almost entirely measured from material objects.)

Director (and co-writer) Matt Spicer captures this world brilliantly. This version of L.A. feels permanently overexposed by sunlight, brightly coloured but desaturated and flat. Everything looks both appealing and welcoming but strangely artificial. Homes look too clean and perfect to really feel that anyone has actually lived in them. Fittingly, the film feels as if it has been shot through an Instagram filter.

This is the world Ingrid is desperate to be a part of and she goes about inserting herself into it with obsessive focus and near sociopathic logic. Ingrid is clearly very manipulative and dangerously unhinged but Ingrid Goes West stops short of simply vilifying her. The film nods towards the creepiness of traditional stalker-thrillers such as Single White Female (a film which, smartly, gets name-checked directly in this one.) However there is also a sadness to Ingrid; a desperate need make something, anything, of herself in a world with few opportunities and even less sympathy so she ends up inspiring memories of Tom Ripley or even, at times, Travis Bickle.

Ingrid isn't entirely alone though. She manages to rope her well-meaning landlord, Dan, into her plots. Dan is played by O'Shea Jackson Jnr who is best known for playing his own father, Ice Cube, in the biopic Straight Outta Compton. This role is the complete opposite of that one, with Jackson smoothing the more aggressive edges he previously mastered so that Dan appears almost childishly naive (it's near impossible to root against a character whose favourite film is, adorably, Batman Forever). Billy Magnussen also appears as Taylor's insufferable brother Nicky, a character so obnoxious and instantly repellent that you can't help but side with Ingrid and her schemes in the hope that he'll somehow be hurt in the process. However, even he is not the true villain of the film. The monster at the heart of Ingrid Goes West is the possessive power of social media itself. It's represented onscreen by Ingrid's phone, which is treated almost as if a cursed object (such as the One Ring of Lord of the Rings) which seduces it's user and controls them until nothing in the real world seems to matter anymore.

Ingrid Goes West is very much a film of our current era and it's not hard to imagine that it's world, built around Instagram likes, would be utterly confounding to future generations (or even some older audience members). However, it accurately portrays an extreme version of a very particular cultural malaise which plagues our generation. Millennials are the most artistic and creative generation but are, also the most prone to crippling depression. We are more connected to each other than ever before and yet we are becoming increasingly lonely. We are a generation who grew up into a world where the fight for work, promotions and educational placements has never been more competitive while the cost of living keeps rising exponentially. A generation who grew up surrounded by inescapable, and psychologically exploitative, advertising, endless 'aspirational' television shows, hopelessly optimistic and unrealistic parental expectations and socio-political movements and media obsessed with praising petty material achievements while shaming anyone who reaches out forlornly for help (or who has the audacity to reach back to help others). We have been trained since birth to feel incomplete unless we can somehow obtain various arbitrary signifiers of success, which will be simply out of reach for the vast majority. It's no wonder that we have found ourselves compulsively clicking, obsessing over the minutiae of each other's lives and feeling a need to constantly improve ourselves and post our progress online for all to see. The world is filled with young adults pouring all their energy into creative endeavours such as cookery, travel, fitness routines, interior decorating or (dare I say it) online criticism in the hope that enough people will see their efforts and 'like' it that they can briefly feel important, beloved and understood. It should be no surprise that a person whose entire existence is counterfeit would thrive in such an atmosphere. Ingrid is ghoulish in her actions but she seeks the same things we all do: meaning, acceptance, appreciation, love. Like Frankenstein's monster, she inspires in equal parts sympathy and horror, and the blame lies less with her than on the arrogance and heartlessness of the world that created her.

Ingrid Goes West is darkly humorous and reliably entertaining throughout but leaves you with a deeply unsettling and familiar thought, felt as the credits roll. How far would you go for a sense of validation?

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Peace out.

#IAmIngrid #Mogulamania

Review by The Mogul.