Movie Review--Ingrid Goes West

by Peter J. O’Connell

Ingrid Goes West. Released: Aug. 2017. Runtime: 97 mins. MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and disturbing behavior.

“Go west, young man!” has been a mantra of America in one form or other throughout its history. The idea is that one can attain a new and better life by that move. Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) is a young woman in Pennsylvania, not a young man, who decides for very contemporary reasons to act on that mantra. Her story is told in director/co-writer Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West, a delightfully dark satire of social media and California lifestyles.

Ingrid is physically “cute” but nerdy, needy, and nervous—nervous almost in the sense of the Poe character who says that he is “very, very nervous but not mad.” Ingrid is an addict. Particularly since the death of her mother, she has become addicted to the social media of the digital world, especially Instagram. When we first encounter her, she is invading a wedding party and pepper spraying the bride (Meredith Hagner) because the bride had not invited her to the wedding. It turns out that the bride’s only contact with Ingrid had been a favorable comment online about one of Ingrid’s postings.

After the pepper spray incident, Ingrid goes into a psychiatric treatment center, but when she gets out, she returns to her previous habits, surfing the Net in a search for online “friends” to validate her existence. Then she discovers Taylor Sloane.

Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) is a social media “influencer” who has become a kind of lifestyle guru through her Instagram postings about the “perfect” bourgeois/bohemian this and that, which she promotes (“Another day, another avocado toast!”) from Venice, California, where she lives. Ingrid becomes obsessed with Taylor, takes the $60,000 in life insurance money left her by her mother, and heads for the Golden State, where she hopes to do what Taylor does and “friend” her idol in person. Apparently, imitation is the severest form of obsession.

In Venice Ingrid rents a small apartment from Dan (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), an affable African-American aspiring screenwriter and Batman aficionado, who gradually develops a romantic interest in Ingrid and becomes enmeshed in her schemes. As soon as she arrives in Venice, Ingrid seeks to adopt the Taylor Sloane lifestyle. She goes to one of Taylor’s favorite restaurants and when asked by the server, “How can I nourish you today?,” she orders avocado toast. But she doesn’t answer the restaurant’s Question of the Day: “What’s your biggest emotional wound?”

Eventually, Ingrid carries out a scam that gets her into the circle of Taylor and her husband, Ezra, an artist whose oeuvre consists of paintings purchased in thrift shops that Ezra then overlays with hashtags. Ingrid is glowing from the reflected “glory” of her seeming friendship with Taylor until Taylor’s utterly obnoxious brother, Nicky (Billy Magnussen), arrives on the scene and threatens to reveal that he has learned that Ingrid is essentially a sad stalker, not worthy to be in Taylor’s circle.

At this point, the movie takes on a darker tone involving such things as blackmail, drug dealing, abduction, assault. The “psycho stalker” movies of the 1980s and ‘90s come to mind, and there is even a scene highly reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ neo-noir Blood Simple (1984). Ingrid is in crisis as she has to face the existential question of whether a person who lives to create a persona solely for the approval of others, whether actual associates or “onliners,” can be said to really have a life at all—or deserve to have one. After all, “going west” is also a slang term for dying.

Matt Spicer takes us through several twists and turns of plot and tone to his somewhat problematic answer to this question at the conclusion of his generally brilliant film. What is not at all problematic, however, in Ingrid Goes West is the terrific quality of the acting. Aubrey Plaza is wondrous as a character who is both appealing and appalling—sometimes at the same time. A star is definitely born in this revelation of a performance. Elizabeth Olsen, an actual young star already, knows exactly how much star power to give to her character—and how much to withhold. And it’s hard to imagine supporting performances better than those of O’Shea Jackson, Jr., and Billy Magnussen in their roles. 

So, go see Ingrid Goes West!