"Not Okay": a new satire about influencers

Danny Sanders (Zoey Deutch) wants to be something. She's a friendless 20-year-old who works as a photo editor at a digital media company. Her phone is a part of her body like most of us. She is obsessed with social networks, life is measured by the number of likes and she falls for a colleague and a puffed-up fuc*boy (Dylan O'Brien who resembles Pete Davidson a little too much). In an attempt to impress him, but also the whole world, and to start her career, she invents a way to Paris and uses photomontage to insert herself into the pictures of all the tourist destinations of the capital of France. Suddenly, a terrorist bombing hits Paris, killing dozens, and Danny decides to drive on with his story of lying about witnessing the attack. Soon, she becomes the face of the survivor movement, standing side by side with Rowan (Mia Isaac), a teenage survivor of a school shooting.

The film itself makes a few mistakes in the very beginning that will backfire on it until the end. The main heroine is made as a horrible and vain person, who has been completely consumed by the demanding society and the sensationalism of the Internet. For her, and the way she sets things up and evaluates things, it seems like there is no going back, and the director of the film, Quinn Shephard, prepares us for her redemption in the second part of the film, which still seems almost impossible. The second problem is that the film is initially, a youthful comedy that has "something to say", and then it slowly becomes a darker drama in its script, which the characters from the first half of the film set they failed to carry on their shoulders.

In one pot, the director Shephard put empty-headed YouTubers, inflated fuc*boys and real traumatized victims, and people who also had life offline, hoping that maybe they would learn from others through criticism or dialogue, but all she got, in that same pot, is a too spicy dish. The serious moments of the script are simply crying out for a serious director who would give a darker and more serious version of the story, without the glitter beautiful actors from the MTV series. 

The most positive side of the film remains Zoey Deutch, a young actress who has one of those faces that you are constantly in the mood for - "where have I seen this little one". You watched her and you will watch her because with her previous work she deserves to enter the first league of actresses in their twenties. The sex scene between her and her partner (O'Brian) in the film is something that has been retold on the Internet for the past few days, both because of its weird awkwardness and because O'Brien's fans finally got to see it.

In the end, this is a story that deserves a serious film, with a serious author team, because the little people from the Internet have been there for a very long time, ready for satire and debunking. At best, we can only see "Not Okay" as the beginning of such a wave.

Post by: Rinna James