Movie Reaction: Ingrid Goes West

Formula: Single White Female + Instagram

There are many reasons to dislike a movie. Some are easier to explain than others. The most common reason is because the movie is just bad: the characters or plot make no sense or the visual language is ugly or incongruent with the story. Immediately, something like Need for Speed or Transformers: The Last Knight comes to mind. These movies are just incompetent. You don't have to work very hard to explain why you don't like them. Another reason to dislike a movie is when something in the tone or messaging bothers you. These are harder to shake. A lot of this could be categorized as "you know better than the movie does". It might be a lawyer hating a legal drama because they know how the law really works. It could also be a film that you just don't like what it's saying. For example, I hated Money Monster because it thought it was a much smarter movie than I found it to be. This kind of movie does even have to be bad. I don't like Network because I think it's making a dumb point, but I accept that it's well acted and produced. It's a personal intellectual response. Then there the movies that make you too physically uncomfortable to enjoy. That can cover a wide spectrum. It can be obvious, like the Saw movies. The writing in those movies could be Shakespeare and it wouldn't matter. I'm not sitting through that if I had a choice. This type of dislike isn't intellectual. It's a gut reaction. Sitting through it makes you physically uncomfortable. Ingrid Goes West is this kind of movie.

Before I get into why, I should first explain what the movie is. It's about Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza). She's an Instagram-obsessed woman who isn't taking the death of her mother very well. Or maybe she wasn't all that well before her mother's death. We don't know. Either way, she has issues now. The film starts with Ingrid doing a stint in a psychiatric hospital following an incident she has with a girl she follows on Instagram. After getting out of the hospital, she returns to her Instagram obsession almost immediately and stumbles onto an Instragram celebrity, Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), who appears to have the perfect life. Ingrid becomes determined to meet Taylor and share that perfect life. Ingrid moves to California and tracks Taylor down via Instragram check-ins. She even lies and tricks her way into befriending Taylor by basically becoming Taylor. The rest of the film is about Ingrid staying ahead of all the lies she's told to ingratiate herself with Taylor. You can guess how well this goes.

The film works on a few more levels than I expected. After all, I saw it for Plaza and Olsen, not the story. I wasn't expecting much from the "Instagram stalker" pitch which is anything but subtle commentary on millennial culture. Since she's the POV character, the film doesn't hide anything about Ingrid. She's not well. She's lying about who she is. She not all that nice either. She isn't a mystery. The fun of the movie is in seeing how the other characters are exposed over time. Taylor presents a perfect life on Instagram, and it is a pretty great life. If it's not a perfect life, it certainly is a privileged one in which she never really has to work and can afford just about anything. She's also vapid and more concerned with selling the ideal of herself than being a real person. She's just a different kind of phony than Ingrid. Even Taylor's husband (Wyatt Russell) and Ingrid's landlord/boyfriend (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) are lying about or to themselves in a number of ways. In fact, the only authentic character is the most overtly unlikable one: Taylor's uber-frat bro brother (Billy Magnussen). I quite liked a lot of the character dynamics. O'Shea Jackson Jr. also gets a nice running gag about being obsessed with Batman. It doesn't mean anything to the film, but they manage to milk more laughs out of it than I expected.

As I mentioned though, I had a strongly negative reaction to the film. It's not that I thought the movie was bad. It's actually just meh. There's two aspects about the movie that made it almost unwatchable for me. The first and foremost is that the movie is built on escalating lies. I hate that structure so much. It makes me physically uncomfortable the whole time. I could get into more critical assessments about why I don't like it - I hate that it requires a lot of characters to be really dumb to work or it forces the movie to be plot-driven, not story-driven - but it's really the gut reaction that bothers me the most. I don't like the inevitability of a fall. It's the same reason I don't like most roller coasters. I hate the build, not the drop*. The other thing I found physically repellent is that I really didn't like Taylor. I love Elizabeth Olsen and think she plays Taylor excellently. That's just not a character I enjoy being around at all, not even in a fictional world. Most of my issue is with the first point though. The film veers nearly into farce. I hate farce.

*Ok, with roller coasters, I hate the drop too. I'm not a fan of being up high or falls.

Ingrid Goes West has wonderful pathos and a very fitting ending. A lot of actors do very good work playing with or against familiar types. Ingrid is tailor-made for Aubrey Plaza, who is the reigning queen of sardonic and sarcastic humor. Wyatt Russell gets to show that a little more is brewing underneath the easy-going persona he's cultivated in films like 22 JumpStreet and Everybody Wants Some!!. Jackson's only other screen appearance so far was playing his dad in Straight Outta Compton. This is a much softer role and he's charming in it. Olsen disappears into roles well. So, she work just as well playing a cool Los Angeles girl in this as she did when I saw her last week playing a rookie CIA agent in Wind River. I just didn't like watching this movie.

Oh, and the short film that played before this was just weird.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend