You Get Me (2017)

You Get Me arrives as a 2017 Netflix thriller, which is to say it arrives quietly and leaves no forwarding address. The plot concerns Tyler, a high schooler who argues with his girlfriend, falls into the arms of a mysterious new arrival named Holly, and then discovers that Holly has enrolled at his school and intends to keep him. What follows is a familiar procession of escalating behaviors: the allergic reaction, the false assault accusation, the kidnapping, the plastic bag. The film knows its lineage. It aspires to Fatal Attraction and settles for something closer to a Swimfan tribute act performed without conviction.

From a cultural standpoint, the film is remarkably inert. Two women circle each other with claws out, the catfight as structural load-bearing wall, and no feminist reading survives contact with it. Mental illness appears strictly as a villainous reveal, a diagnosis deployed the way an earlier era deployed a scarred face. The cast includes several minority performers in supporting roles, but the film never pauses to comment on them, so the diversity remains ambient and unremarked. There is no lecture here, no sermon, no moment where the audience is invited to examine its own assumptions. The film has other things on its mind, mostly a fire poker.

The result is a thriller that offends no one and interests few. It is not preachy. It is not ideological. It is simply a bad movie, and there is a certain integrity in that. We classify it accordingly, with the weary respect owed to any artifact that refuses to mean anything at all.