Marc Selman

VIP

8

I needed to let that movie sink in. I went into it only knowing a very basic premise and that Mila Kunis is apparently giving a career best performance.

The movie tackles not one, but two extremely diffcult topics. It deals with rape and a school shooting. So, if those topics are triggering to to you, do not watch it. Do not continue with this review.

Kunis does in fact give a great performance as a woman traumatized by her past who has never really confronted her trauma and tried to push it away. Her character, Ani, is a writer for a women's magazine (writing about sex and man's pleasure nonetheless), engaged to rich and successful Luke (a great Finn Wittrock) and seemingly has build a great life for herself.

What is known to public is that she is the survivor of a school shooting and that fellow survivor Dean (Alex Barone) accuses her of being an accomplice rather than a victim. What nobody knows, because the story got twisted through the years is, that Ani was raped by Dean and his friends, Ani's High School boyfriend Liam (Isaac Kragten) among them, when she was a teenager.

Kunis does indeed a great job here. It's a break from her usual comfortable (even though great) comedic performances and she is allowed to show off some acting chops here. Ani is abrasive and hollow and created a personality that pleases people around her. She is a chameleon that can adapt to any situation to seem as "fine" as possible. She is not always a likeable character and she doesn't have to be. Would I call it a career best performance, I don't know. Most the heavy lifting is done by Cruel Summer's Chiara Aurelia who portrays a younger Ani, or Tiffany as she was known back then. Aurelia already showed in Cruel Summer that she is a great young actress and shines here as well, portraying a confused and scared girl, overwhelmed with a terrible situation and not able to deal with her trauma.

When a documentary film maker approaches Ani about an interview showcasing her point of view on the shooting, a downward spiral starts that pushes Ani to confront feelings she has buried a long time ago. Haunting flashbacks cue the viewer in on what really happened.

I admit, at first I was sure the movie would provide a twist ending. It toyed very early on (and very on the nose) with the concept of an unreliable narrator and I was almost certain that the movie would reveal Ani as an accomplice in the last couple of minutes (which would explain the sometimes grading voice over which could get slightly annoying). Half way through I was hoping to be wrong, because Ani being involved in planing a shooting wouldn't have done real survivors any good and would've felt exploitative and tasteless. Thankfully I was wrong and the twist never came. The movie works simply as an encouragement to speak up, that your trauma is valid and that no one can tell you how to feel about it. And that a lot of peope are simply trash and don't deserve to be protected, even if they went through terrible experiences as well.

The movie constantly walks a fine and sensitive line and tries to deal with both topics in a respectful way. Ani chooses to be called a victim instead of a survivor, because she had been denied to be one for so many years.

It also doesn't shy away from making sure the audience knows that the shooters have initially been victims of excessive bullying, but it doesn't excuse their behavior and choices with it. Instead of excusing what they did or blaming it on mental health (something the media loves to do) it shows it as a clear act of inexcusable revenge porn that's not justified, no matter through how much pain they went. Ani's choice not to engage in the horrible act, despite being traumatized and hurt by her fellow students actions and living on to turn her pain into something that can actively help other victims, is the direct flip side to it.

It's not an easy movie to watch and sometimes stays too much on the surface when it could have landed a deep dive, but for the complexity and sensitivity of the subject matter it does a fine job.

A visual feast, with an excellent musical score... but the rest just falls flat. There's nothing to hold the viewer's interest.
Can't see myself following this season beyond the 2 episodes that premiered.

The characters and their dialogue are so poorly written, it feels like I'm watching robots. They don't make choices or drive the story forward, things just happen to them.
(Potential exception: Elrond and his emerging storyline. But we see so little of him it's not worth slogging through the rest)

AND, If you're going to spend insane amounts of money on a project like this - why not hire ONE director and ONE main writer to take care of the whole season, instead of employing these no-vision, direct/write-one-episode-and-I'm-out hacks?
Give me low-budget creations by a team of passionate people who actually have something to say over this soulless "content", any day.