I Would Like to See It: Ingrid Goes West

There’s something uniquely crushing about the final shot in Ingrid Goes West, Matt Spicer’s 2017 black comedy about mentally ill 30-something Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) and her parasocial turned parasitic relationship with Instagram starlet Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). Awakening from a suicide attempt in the wake of her life’s total collapse, Ingrid finds that a tearful video she posted before taking an overdose of sleeping pills has become an overnight viral sensation. Tens of thousands of people now follow her Instagram account. The look of joyous tunnel vision that breaks over Plaza’s face recalls nothing so strongly as Gollum transported by bliss as he plummets into the fires of Mount Doom, the One Ring clutched in his spidery fingers. This sudden micro-fame is the end to any possibility of change for her, an endless well of unconditional reinforcement for her social and emotional dysfunction.

Spicer’s film is deeply bleak, mapping the contested border between human connection and online fame with nastily insightful particularity, but it never loses sight of the void in Ingrid’s heart that all her desperate, clumsy artifice is trying to fill. Her loneliness is constant and grinding, her panic that any given connection might slip away at any moment so abrasive it ensures the realization of its own worst catastrophizing. Once the vapid, social-climbing Taylor begins to separate from Ingrid, drawn by the shiny new lure of an influencer even more famous and fabulous than herself, Ingrid’s desperation to retain a connection that’s already dead seems to swell up like a throat in the throes of anaphylaxis, filling every scene with cloying, repulsive tension. It’s the futility of it that renders it so hard to watch. Taylor never cared about Ingrid, who in turn fixated on Taylor only out of extreme loneliness and dysfunction, but rather saw her as a kind of pet or mascot, relevant only until someone more socially advantageous appeared.

The nightmarish quality of the film’s demimonde of Californian influencers is nicely leavened by small moments of personal vulnerability. As Taylor, Olsen is equal parts charming and dead inside, her dearest dream to open a hotel named after a reference from a book she hasn’t read and filled with curated little rooms stuffed with products she endorses and decor she features on her Instagram. All, of course, for sale. It’s almost laughable in its ugly, shallow crudeness. Her husband’s appalling hashtag art provides a surprisingly sincere segue to his drunken poolside account of the isolation and embarrassment he feels inside their marriage. Through all this interpersonal misery, Taylor’s brother Nicky (Evan Peters) flits like a malevolent imp, grinning and quipping as he pokes holes in Ingrid’s fake life story and cheerfully blackmails her behind closed doors. If Spicer’s film is brutal about living without real connection, brutality is what the subject demands.