Ingrid Goes West (2017)

Ingrid Goes West arrives as a study in the modern compulsion to be seen, and it conducts that study with a straight razor. Aubrey Plaza plays Ingrid Thorburn, a woman who has confused the curated feed of a Los Angeles influencer for an invitation to intimacy. The film observes her descent with a cold and steady eye, never pausing to lecture about screen time or the loneliness economy. It shows the damage and lets us draw our own conclusions. For a picture built on topical anxieties, the restraint is almost admirable.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a modest specimen. Its leading women are given real interiority, and the whole enterprise could be framed as a comment on female friendship and the performance of femininity, but the target is obsession, not the patriarchy. O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Pom Klementieff appear in supporting roles and are allowed to simply exist, their identities unremarked and unweaponized. The film takes a light swipe at the influencer economy, at the way a person becomes a brand and a brand becomes a cage, though it never builds toward any systemic indictment. Ingrid's psychological unraveling drives the plot, and the script treats her condition as a clinical curiosity to be diagnosed from a safe distance. There is a moral in here about comparison and performative living, delivered through discomfort and dark laughter instead of a sermon.

We could call it preachy only if we were being unkind, and I am not. The satire lands because it refuses to flatter its audience or its subject. The film leaves us with a tidy, unpleasant portrait of a woman who wanted a friend and got a follower count. It does not pretend to solve her, which is the most honest thing about it.