Review: Ingrid Goes West

Ingrid Goes West (15)

USA 2017  98 mins  Dir: Matt Spicer  Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen

A stalker drama for the narcissistic Instagram generation, Ingrid Goes West is a film that was bound to be made sooner or later. First-time writer/director Matt Spicer’s eagerness to have his virtual artisan cake and eat it means this should appeal equally to social media-dodgers and millennials who can’t bear to be separated from their smartphones. His sly satire takes us on a somewhat bumpy ride, with awkward tonal shifts, but is held together by strong performances.

There’s little ambiguity about deranged sad-sack loner Ingrid (Plaza) from the outset. Living exclusively in a world of empty ‘likes’ and cyber-‘friends’, she gloms on to another young woman who lives a seemingly perfect selfie-driven life online. Alas, the stalkee’s failure to deliver an invitation to her wedding prompts Ingrid to go full psycho and she winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Released and reunited with her beloved smartphone, she finds her mother has died leaving her $60,000. She then happens upon a glossy magazine interview with glamorous ‘Instagram influencer’ Taylor Sloane (Olsen), who’s given to posting snaps of all her meals and making such vapid pronouncements as: “I love making friends with people all over the world”. Naturally, easily influenced Ingrid takes this as a personal invitation. After making contact online, she withdraws her inheritance in cash and hits the road to California bent on inveigling her way into Taylor’s enviable life – initially by purchasing all the shit she’s paid to promote.

There’s a certain ‘fish in a barrel’ quality to the film’s pot-shots at lifestyle envy and naked capitalism with a touchy-feely bohemian veneer, as well as its dramatis personae of La La Land fakes and wannabes: Ingrid’s landlord Dan Pinto (Jackson Jr.) claims to be writing a Batman movie, while Taylor’s husband Ezra (Russell) is a self-styled artist who hasn’t sold a single work. This is a world of ‘wellness’, ‘re-grounding’ and hipster cafes that greet customers with a Question of the Day (“What’s your biggest emotional wound?”) and a faux-cheery “How may I nourish you today?” And, yes, before you make the observation, it really could be set in Bristol. But the arrival of Taylor’s impecunious, amoral, asshole brother Nicky (Magnussen) from Paris signals a turn into more familiar territory, as the film self-consciously name-checks Single White Female and becomes decidedly Ripley-esque. But it’s still good fun for all that, with a particularly strong performance by Aubrey Plaza as the desperate but cunning Ingrid and plenty of astringent jibes at the shallow milieu of ‘Instafans’, in which there is no greater achievement than becoming a hashtag – even though one half-suspects that Spicer is as much in thrall to this as repulsed by it, leading to a glib and rather compromised ending.