This film has a lot in common with Bodies Bodies Bodies. It’s a black comedy-horror slasher type deal that takes the piss out of social media influencers and the kind of attitudes they engender. Except, where Bodies Bodies Bodies had a bit of a voyeuristic bent to it, treating the influencers with some distance between them and the audience in terms of relatability, this one is more of an inside-out affair. It focuses on Cecilia (Aisha Dee), a mental health advocate on social media, who is invited to the hen’s night of her school bestie (Hannah Barlow’s Emma, who also co-wrote and co-directed the film with her husband Kane Senes). Shit accidentally goes wild.
It has some solid remarks to make about influencer culture, the parasocial relationships that are built between the influencer and their audience (something prevalent in basically any kind of content creation online to some extent), and the dangers of the unqualified giving advice on such sensitive topics. Belle Gibson is name-dropped at one point in the film, who herself is one of these natural medicine ‘wellness’ gurus that got convicted for scamming people by pretending to have brain cancer, along with endorsing a lot of anti-vaxx nonsense. Yeah, the danger can be very real with this stuff.
However, the main point where this and something like Bodies Bodies Bodies diverge is that the commentary doesn’t start and stop there. It also gets into the backlash racket to such things, where the equally-prevalent rebuttals to influencer ideology, along with the larger media forces that further its reach for similarly cynical reasons, and highlights the hypocrisy that can come out of such remarks. Sure, we can talk all day about how this kind of social media narcissism results from regular dopamine rushes from using such services… but the same effect also comes from lashing out at those same people to feed our own self-assured righteousness. It’s basically a running gag nowadays that just about any opinion expressed online will result in at least one death threat in response, and even when it’s directed towards someone who actually did do something wrong (as opposed to, say, just giving off the wrong vibes)… are you saying it for their benefit or your own?
And in that intersection of social media use and bullying both on and offline, there is Cecilia herself. Equal parts Carrie, Muriel Heslop, and Lola from The Loved Ones, the film gives a vivid depiction of the kind of damage she’s been sitting with since her school days. She’s part of the influencer racket, sure, but with everything we see, of how ingrained that sense of presentation and production is for her, it feels like an extreme case of ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. If you’re dealing with internal demons, struggling to come to terms with the things you’ve done and the want to be seen as a person and not just a freak… well, just be positive. Be wholesome. Be a beacon of light. And maybe, if you do hard enough, no matter what else is happening, you might start to believe it after a while.
Actually, when I put it like that, this is basically the flipside of what I said about Smile; when that same imposed sense of happiness is internalised, it’s just as horrifying as when someone else is goading you into it.
Toxic positivity, much like toxic masculinity, is something worth highlighting as separate from the whole, lest they be entirely mistaken as one and the same, both by critics and by those that it describes. And while Cecilia is definitely engaging in that toxicity, what with her chanted affirmations and disconnects from reality (she’s basically the female Patrick Bateman, right down to the beauty mask), it’s difficult not to feel sorry for her because of what likely drove her to pursuing that. And when all that childhood trauma resurfaces because others just can’t get out of that mindset… well, cornered animals tend to bite back. If you want to hold onto shit from back then, as if neither of you have changed at all since, be careful what you wish for.
At a time when lambasting the influencer hustle is a hustle in itself, a film like this that actively questions such things while also making the audience feel for the influencer in question is quite the accomplishment. It’s open and honest about the dangers of such activities, but also avoids turning it into an easy opportunity for the audience to just pat themselves on the back for not being like ‘them’. Rather, it actively points the finger at how deep that narcissistic, two-faced behaviour runs, and acknowledges that while people pulling shady shit online isn’t a good thing, being an outright dick in response isn’t much better.
It doesn’t take the easy way out, epitomised by a central character that consistently skirts the line between victim and perpetrator, and a performance from Aisha Dee that makes for one of the most fascinating of any film this year. It’s everything that made Bodies Bodies Bodies so much fun to watch, but with an emphasis on empathy over superiority.
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