Ingrid Goes West (2017)

I watched Ingrid Goes West on a plane with absolutely zero context other than I saw it had recently been added to Netflix. In hindsight, that turned out to be the ideal way to experience this movie, because part of what makes it so effective is watching Ingrid Thorburn’s behavior escalate without knowing where the ceiling is. You spend the whole runtime bracing for the floor to drop out, and it does, repeatedly, in ways that are funny and then immediately not funny at all.

The premise is simple on paper. Ingrid, played by Aubrey Plaza, becomes fixated on an Instagram influencer named Taylor Sloane, played by Elizabeth Olsen, whose feed is full of avocado toast, boho decor, and the kind of effortless-looking California lifestyle that exists specifically to make other people feel like they’re doing life wrong. After a personal breakdown and a small inheritance, Ingrid moves to LA, engineers a meet-cute with Taylor by stealing her dog, and slowly worms her way into Taylor’s social circle by mirroring her interests, her aesthetic, and eventually her entire personality. It’s a friendship built on a lie from the first minute, and the movie never lets you forget it, even when Ingrid and Taylor genuinely seem to be having fun together.

That tension is where the discomfort lives, and wooooo buddy, is it uncomfortable. I kept waiting for a moment where Ingrid would pull back, get some self-awareness, or at least slow down, and she never does. Every time the movie gives you a small window where things could go okay, Ingrid closes it herself. Plaza plays this without a hint of cartoonishness, which is exactly why it’s so hard to watch. She’s not doing an exaggerated “unhinged stalker” performance. She’s playing someone lonely, grieving her mother, and completely untethered from any sense of boundaries, and she plays all of that as recognizably human rather than as a horror movie villain. There’s a scene where Ingrid practices a text message to Taylor by typing it out over and over before sending it, adjusting the tone, deleting words, trying to sound casual, and it’s such an accurate depiction of the kind of anxious performance a lot of people do before hitting send that it stopped being funny for me almost immediately. Plaza has built a career on playing deadpan and detached, and she uses that same flatness here to different effect, letting Ingrid’s desperation show through the cracks instead of hiding behind it.

Olsen is also doing something trickier than it first appears. Taylor could easily have been written as a one-note mean-girl influencer, but the script and Olsen’s performance let you see how much of Taylor’s persona is also a performance, just a more socially rewarded one. She’s shallow and self-absorbed, sure, but she’s also super pathetic in her own right, chasing brand deals and validation with the same hollow hunger that’s driving Ingrid, just dressed up in better lighting. O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays Dan, the aspiring screenwriter Ingrid starts dating, and he ends up being the emotional anchor of the film, mostly because he’s the only person who seems to be operating with genuine intentions. I hadn’t seen him or Olsen in much before this, and both of them held their own next to Plaza’s performance, which is saying something.

What surprised me, given how uncomfortable the movie made me, is that I never wanted to stop watching it. The pacing helps. Director Matt Spicer keeps things moving fast enough that you don’t get to sit in the dread for too long before the next escalation happens, and the satire stays sharp even as the plot gets darker. It’s also just an accurate portrait of the loneliness that social media both creates and exploits, the gap between the life someone is performing online and the life they’re actually living, and how easy it is to convince yourself that closing that gap for someone else means you understand who they really are. Ingrid isn’t just chasing Taylor’s approval; she’s chasing the idea that if she can get close enough to a curated life, some of that curation will rub off on her own.

I wouldn’t call this movie fun, exactly, but I’d call it good, and those aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s a dark comedy that works precisely because it refuses to let you off the hook with easy jokes or a tidy redemption arc. I’d recommend it to anyone who liked Nightcrawler or The King of Comedy for that same queasy blend of comedy and character study, or anyone who has ever felt a little too seen by their own relationship with social media.