It’s an enduring paradox that for as much time as we spend on the internet – narrativizing ourselves, intaking others, dissecting content into takes and memes – very few films accurately capture the experience of social media or the head-scrambling velocity of being online. Recent attempts have fallen flat, either into cheap, simple didacticism (Mainstream’s message of internet = bad) or Zola’s hazy, languorous adaptation of what was a punchy viral Twitter thread. The good ones –Eighth Grade, Ingrid Goes West, Searching – have managed to convincingly portray the warping force of the digital world through maladaptations of human behavior, with a grasp on a specific micro-era of digital culture.
Not Okay, written and directed by 27-year-old Quinn Shephard, aims squarely for the title of “internet film”. Its protagonist, friendless twentysomething Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), works as a photo editor at a Refinery29/Buzzfeed-esque digital media company called Depravity. Her bedazzled phone is totem, oracle, companion – she clutches it near constantly, pecks at it listlessly in her dark Brooklyn apartment. With her two platinum hair streaks and candy-colored rings, Deutch, who is also 27, looks like a Zoomer, and Danni calls herself a “zillennial”, but her obsession with social media perfection and becoming a New York writer feel distinctly millennial.
To the even somewhat online, Shephard’s screenplay will recall a number of late-2010s viral phenomena, mashed up and rearranged into an original story which feels like Spotify radio – smooth, vaguely derivative, the enjoyment dependent more on familiarity than insight. Like the notorious internet celebrity Caroline Calloway (who appears briefly as herself), Danni is the child of rich parents who aspires to writing success without actual writing. Like Anna Delvey, the so-called “Soho grifter” who inspired the Netflix series Inventing Anna, Danni spins a web of intricate lies that win her fawning friends and, eventually, widespread scorn.
Like Aubrey Plaza’s Ingrid in Ingrid Goes West, Danni is a talented mimic primarily motivated by obsession: first, with co-worker Colin (Dylan O’Brien), a weed influencer whose style – bleached hair, ambient vape cloud, Black slang-inflected speech – riffs on the internet thirst for e-boy dirtbags a la Pete Davidson. In order to impress him and spite more successful co-worker Harper (Nadia Alexander), Danni invents a writer’s retreat in Paris and photoshops her glamorous time abroad. As in Dear Evan Hansen, Danni’s silly and somewhat sympathetic lie escalates into an unforgivable, attention-grabbing one after a traumatic event: a fictionalized terrorist bombing in Paris that kills dozens.