Ingrid Goes West * * *

I find it just as hard to say what is wrong with this film as to say what is right.  There are positives and negatives in both columns.

        Ingrid is a lonely young woman who spends hours and hours on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc with all her “friends” who she has never met and probably never will.  She tweets and posts every trivial thing, as many Twitter / Instagram users tend to do. One day, through a printed magazine, rather than the internet ironically, she reads of a young woman in California, Taylor, who just seems to have it all: Lifestyle, cool opinion, blah blah..

Hashtag me? Friend me?  Follow me?

       Ingrid decides she wants to be her friend - but for real. So with the inheritance from her Mother converted to cash, she goes west to meet Taylor.  She moves into an apartment run by a questionable landlord with a good heart who also becomes an unlikely friend.

     Ingrid stalks Taylor for a while and plots and eventually ingratiates herself into her life only to find the same level of emptiness and vacuousness that is in her own life.  She also meets her pretentious deluded boyfriend and dangerously disassociated, drug addled brother whose unbalanced conduct helps catapult the story forward.

      It’s intelligently plotted and made with sincerity but it just doesn’t quite work for me. After all the plot twists we are left with a critical situation where social media plays a key role.    

        Yeah we get it - it can be good and bad.

      In the end, I felt, is that all? Is that all you were trying to say? Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?  It’s like a long, albeit entertaining, speech telling us something which we already know.

         Making a film which is based on people’s lives being ruled by social media is a good idea but hardly new.  As a commentary on Social Media and it’s influence and impact I felt it paled compared to Men Women and Children (2014).