"Ingrid Goes West" is a devilishly dark comedy about how the quest for social media fame can be taken to monstrous extremes.
Aubrey Plaza plays Ingrid, an emotionally unwell young woman who is struggling to recover from the death of her mother. Painfully lonely and friendless, she insinuates herself into the lives of people she admires via social media and then proceeds to freak them out when she becomes too possessive. As the movie begins, she's done this at least once already, and the rest of the movie shows us Ingrid going about doing it again, uprooting her life and moving to Los Angeles so that she can stalk her favorite Instagram friend.
The tragedy of the film is that, of course, Ingrid can be genuinely likable. She uses duplicitous and creepy means to establish a relationship with said Instagram friend (played by Elisabeth Olsen), but once she has it's the strength of her personality and the fact that she's a genuinely fun person that keeps the friendship going. But a casual friendship isn't good enough for Ingrid. In the world of social media, where everything must be the best. thing. ever., she wants to be Olsen's best, only, and truest friend, and it's her obsessive fixation that eventually does her and her friendship in.
"Ingrid Goes West" takes things a little too far in its efforts to be satiric, and it goes slightly off the rails by the time it's done. But I really liked how this film captured the relationship certain people have with social media. If Ingrid were to put half the effort into sorting out her actual life as she does into manufacturing a fake one, she might go a long way to improving her lot.
If nothing else, "Ingrid Goes West" is certainly a movie for our times.
Grade: A-
Aubrey Plaza plays Ingrid, an emotionally unwell young woman who is struggling to recover from the death of her mother. Painfully lonely and friendless, she insinuates herself into the lives of people she admires via social media and then proceeds to freak them out when she becomes too possessive. As the movie begins, she's done this at least once already, and the rest of the movie shows us Ingrid going about doing it again, uprooting her life and moving to Los Angeles so that she can stalk her favorite Instagram friend.
The tragedy of the film is that, of course, Ingrid can be genuinely likable. She uses duplicitous and creepy means to establish a relationship with said Instagram friend (played by Elisabeth Olsen), but once she has it's the strength of her personality and the fact that she's a genuinely fun person that keeps the friendship going. But a casual friendship isn't good enough for Ingrid. In the world of social media, where everything must be the best. thing. ever., she wants to be Olsen's best, only, and truest friend, and it's her obsessive fixation that eventually does her and her friendship in.
"Ingrid Goes West" takes things a little too far in its efforts to be satiric, and it goes slightly off the rails by the time it's done. But I really liked how this film captured the relationship certain people have with social media. If Ingrid were to put half the effort into sorting out her actual life as she does into manufacturing a fake one, she might go a long way to improving her lot.
If nothing else, "Ingrid Goes West" is certainly a movie for our times.
Grade: A-