So, here's the thing. You gotta kind of use your brain to get what's going on in this movie, and it's never going to directly spell it all out for you. There is an explanation to what happens, but there's not a character in the movie explaining to all the slow thinkers at home "This is what happens and this is why, and this is the motivation." If you accept that going in, then this movie is decent. If you're only half paying attention, or not good at thinking, you're going to end up like 90% of the comment section here and get frustrated.
Do you want to know what really happened here? Alice, aka Lola, had an AI program pretending to be her. The AI program took over her profile and used past videos of her to deduct what her fans were into, and "perfected her formula". Notice how she shot up in rankings when the AI took over, and it was implied during the movie that all of the top girls on the site were really just AI's of the people formerly in charge of their accounts. The top girl had been dead for years, and when she confronts sweaty weirdo he explains to her he's seen it before. A lot of the reviewers here seem to not understand this part, or need it explained why this would happen it seems. Well here's an easy explanation, because if the site is in on it, they take all the profits and no longer need to pay the performer. Wham bam done, explained.
What the movie does less of job explaining is why Alice acts the way she does. Why not tell her mother it's not her in the video, even if she still will want to own up to the fact she does the same thing? Why does she run from the guy who took her out to eat? He does clearly say he helped the other girls get to the top, so maybe what that means is he planned on killing her so her AI could permanently take her place, maybe he killed the other girls already. Who knows, but that's the one open ended thing about this movie that could've been better explained, and would've made me rate it higher.
All in all, it wasn't a bad movie at all, you've just gotta use your brain a little to connect the dots on your own.
Review by Hitori_MusukoBlockedParentSpoilers2019-01-17T02:09:27Z
Interesting concept, well acted, but nothings ever really clearly explained. I thought it was going to be something around deepfakes or something like that, but nope. They never really discuss money, like they never say that she isn't making money when the fake takes over, it's not even really implied since she's still splashing out to talk to the fake and buy her brother gifts and stuff. Some characters aren't really explained and just seem to flip flop, like Barney (I think that's his name) I get it's probably just showing people online are just facade's, but it's just unexplained and out of character in a way. Even the discovery of what she does was odd, it caused like a small rift that was fixed when she came home, one unanswered call to her mother is like the only sort of conflict beyond the discovery at the party and then yeah it's just fine, despite the fact it was in front of her brother, his friends, her mum and seems like various close friends and family, didn't seem to cause any issues when she goes out and stuff. Everything feels sort of inconsequential, since there's no real big effect after something happening. The ending doesn't explain the origins of where the fake came from, why they did it and who did it? so it's a movie with suspects who are almost immediately aren't suspects and no real conclusion which is what this film needed, since it implied a person or people were doing this. Just feels like a cool concept being wasted, by overlooking certain things that needed some addressing to keep the story coherent. Its pretty much a mystery that wasn't really solved and she goes back to work, but tries to be more careful of these people or AI? it just feels like a mess, but again it was well acted and well shot which is a positive, but would recommend a watch just to see what could have been I guess.
Reading the collider interview done after, he said it was supposed to be an algorithm and he was going to show servers and stuff to make it clear, but thought it was distracting, but without that, it makes less sense. He wanted to make it a film about an artist who will stop at nothing to do their craft, but it's never portrayed that way, she just seems to do it as a job to pay bills, but she has some morals. It's interesting especially reading the interview, seeing it like just a machine taking over your life kind of is interesting, but a lack of time spent getting certain things across or explaining things holds the film back.