Ingrid Goes West | Film Review

Hey Guys x

This is my first post of the new year, so happy new year everyone!

I'm starting with a film review, because why not?

I had been wanting to watch this film for so long, because I'm a fan of both Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen, so I thought that seeing them in a movie together would be amazing.

The film is about a girl called Ingrid (Plaza) whose life seems to be pretty directionless. She's just lost her mother and inherited a lot of cash, but she has nothing to do with it. However, through the eyes of Instagram, she becomes obsessed with a girl called Taylor (Olsen). So obsessed that she decides to use the money to move to LA to meet Taylor in person. When the girls eventually meet, they become friends. But there are cracks in their lives that the other never expected. And what started as a social-media based friendship, becomes an IRL nightmare.

I loved this film a lot. As someone who, like most people my age, uses social media quite a lot, it's impossible not to think about your own profiles when you're watching a film like this.

For me, films like this tend to be scarier than horror films because they're so real. The character of Ingrid in particular felt really real to me. It doesn't seem unrealistic for someone to idolise someone else via their Instagram and decide that they want to be a part of that person's life.
And I'm not saying that Ingrid isn't unstable, because she completely is. She's a girl that had a lot of internal problems before even entering the world of social media. But it is interesting to see the way that Instagram completely took a hold of her life and made her become someone that even she didn't recognise.

And then there's the character of Taylor, one who I didn't warm to as much as I did Ingrid, and I think that this made the film even better. From the point of view of the film, and of Ingrid, Taylor is literally just a girl with an Instagram account that a lot of people happen to follow. I don't feel like I know her that well because I'm not supposed to.

In fact, one of the things that leads to trouble in their friendship is the fact that Ingrid finds out that Taylor isn't perfect, and she's not this person that is portrayed through perfect pictures on her Insta. And I think that's so important for a story like this, it has to be acknowledged that Instagram and its counterparts aren't real life - they're fake and manipulated and... weird.

But overall, this film was a great depiction of some serious issues, and I really think that it should be marketed as a bit of a psychological thriller as well as a comedy-drama, because it deserves to be taken more seriously than that.

Have you seen this film? What do you think?

Lou xx