I just saw "Ingrid Goes West" (2017), and I want to tell you about it.
After her dramatic destruction of one such "friendship" and a resultant inpatient psychiatric treatment, Ingrid discovers a new potential platonic attachment figure in Taylor Sloane (played by Elizabeth Olsen) and relocates to Los Angeles to pursue a friendship with her.
What follows is by turns darkly hilarious, viscerally cringe-inducing, and deeply unnerving. While I wouldn't say this makes for comfortable viewing, it is nevertheless fascinating.
Ingrid wraps herself in thicker and thicker folds of lies, bending and breaking various laws along the way, in an effort to establish, shore up, and then defend the relationship she forms with Taylor. And in part because Taylor is also lost and lonely in a way that only people with painstakingly curated #perfect lives can be, for a time Ingrid's strident maneuvering into Taylor's life actually works.
One of several successes of "Ingrid Goes West" is its convincing assertion is that the howling emptiness that dominates Ingrid's life finds its clear though less virulent sister in the hollowness of Taylor's. While Ingrid is painfully aware of her urgent and unmet need for genuine affiliation and intimacy, Taylor's smacks her in the face with increasing frankness but never quite powerfully enough to break through the veneer of her denial.
Another notable coup is the film's success in finding a different way of telling a story that admittedly has several previous iterations. This is not a film about obsessive romantic love like "Fatal Attraction" (1987), "Obsessed" (2009) (throwback!), or my personal favorite, the UTTERLY TERRIFYING "Amelie" (2001) gone haywire of "He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not" (2002). It's also not the creepy "erotic" (giant quotation marks implied) nightmare of a roommate relationship gone awry as portrayed in "Single White Female" (1992). Instead of veering into deranged jilted slasher territory, "Ingrid Goes West" takes a different path into terrain that is more real and therefore more humanizing to all concerned... while still ending on a decidedly disconcerting note. **
Of all the film's little twists and emotional notes, what is lingering most prominently is my empathic terror for Ingrid. Spoilers ahoy, but: As she weeps into her phone in what she plans to be her final Insta-post, she lays bare how achingly she wishes not to be alone anymore. If there's no one to share one's life with, she wonders, what's the point? And given how much she stumbles and falters in trying to form connections with others precisely because she wants connection so badly, the audience has to wonder what it would take for her to escape the isolated cage in which she finds herself. It's hard to see how Ingrid could get out of her own way.
The choice she makes in that moment is not an effective one. Yet, in a final twist that is at once deeply problematic and in some ways true, it is precisely this choice, made when she is at her most self-destructive, that yields her highest relational rewards. Because of how dangerously her attempted self-destruction is reinforced, it's clear that Ingrid's path toward clarity, balance, self-understanding, and sustainable relationships will be long--but hopefully, with the influence of her sweet new boyfriend Dan (played by O'Shea Jackson Jr.), not impassable.
I gave the movie a 4.
{Heart}
** = This film includes a suicide attempt. Suicide is a permanent answer to temporary problems--and truly, they are all temporary if you stick around long enough to work through them. If you need help to do that, please reach out for support.
Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 (800) 273 8255
suicidepreventionlifeline.org
