LIKE ME (2017)

Studio:       Kino Lorber
Director:    Robert Mockler
Writer:       Robert Mockler
Producer:  Jenn Wexler, Jessalyn Abbott, Robert Mockler, James Belfer, Larry Fessenden
Stars:     Addison Timlin, Ian Nelson, Larry Fessenden, Jeremy Gardner, Stuart Rudin, Nicolette Pierini

Review Score:

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Summary:

An aimless teenager desperate for social media attention embarks on a crime spree in hopes of impressing her online audience.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While wearing a mask, teenager Kiya breaks into a convenience store, points a gun at the clerk’s head, and records the man pissing himself. A struggle ensues over the gun, which turns out to be a prop, but Kiya manages to escape in her car.

Obsessed with social media popularity, Kiya posts her video of the encounter online and is initially pleased to receive over two million hits and numerous reaction videos. However, a popular reaction video from teenager Burt Walden berates Kiya for being an insignificant person driven solely by fame and tells her she should kill herself.

Kiya begins recording a homeless man on the street. When the man asks her to stop filming, Kiya bargains to stop if he agrees to join her for pancakes. Confused and uncomfortable with Kiya’s repeated requests for him to tell her a story, the man sneaks out of the diner while Kiya is in the bathroom.

While staying in a motel, Kiya propositions the manager Marshall to come to her room for sex. Marshall finds Kiya wearing a mask and wig while swinging from a hammock with the walls and floor covered in plastic. Kiya ties Marshall to the bed and records herself cutting his stomach and forcing him to eat junk food until he pukes.

Kiya kidnaps Marshall and takes him with her on the road. Kiya keeps Marshall sedated with horse tranquilizers and psychotropic drugs as the two of them seemingly form an unusual bond over the course of their conversations.

Kiya posts the video of Marshall vomiting and receives another scathing reaction video from Burt Walden. When Burt taunts that she won’t have the nerve to shoot Marshall like her followers are requesting, Kiya fires two shots into Marshall’s arm.

Kiya races to a motel and applies a tourniquet to prevent Marshall from bleeding into unconsciousness as he hallucinates. Once Marshall is stabilized, the two of them huff paint to get high and Kiya has Marshall tell her a story.

Kiya’s pet rat escapes the room and Kiya goes outside to find it. Kiya returns to a sneak attack from Marshall, who punches Kiya in the face repeatedly before taking her rat and leaving.

Her face and her spirit broken, Kiya tracks down Burt Walden and chases him to the seashore with an aluminum baseball bat. Kiya begins laughing and Burt assumes he is safe for a moment. Kiya then pulls out her phone to record herself beating Burt to death. Kiya sits in the sand and stares calmly at Burt’s body.

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Review:

A pet peeve when reading reviews involves finding critics who appear to fearfully filter words they really wish to write.  Instead they echo popular sentiments, parroting platitudes of what they assume everyone expects them to say, probably placating a PR person in the process.

You see this often with abstract genre filmmakers and commonly with film festival selections.  Writers poetically identify avant-garde aesthetics or “fever dream” atmospheres, yet rarely put the same finger on pointed purposes or a particular effect such elements have on a viewer.  The sense is one of confusion mistaken as meaning and then sold as something academically arty because someone is too afraid to say, “I don’t get it.”

I almost stepped into that trap with “Like Me,” a movie that does nothing for me on either an entertainment or personally introspective level.  For a moment, I considered I might be too old to be hip to what first-time filmmaker Robert Mockler sets out to say with his story of aimless youth wandering a world dominated by viral videos.  I felt like kidnapped Larry Fessenden in the film when he asks, “what is this, ’60 Minutes’?” and his teenage captor replies, “what’s ’60 Minutes’?”

Then in soaking up the exquisitely candy colored cinematography, intentionally erratic editing, and arthouse indie mood, I considered maybe Mockler’s cinematic concepts were so high as to be over my head.  Perhaps I should fear being the minority mouth yawning disinterestedly while the majority applauds a presumably bold, yet indeterminate statement on contemporary culture.

Nah.  I’m willing to say, “I don’t get it.”  Because I’m not convinced “Like Me” has much worth getting in the first place.

Teenage loner Kiya is so desperate for any kind of connection that she’ll take it digitally.  She is so starved for attention that she’ll grab it the quickest way anyone can.  And what’s a lazier way to make your name known in the 21st century than conducting a crime spree and posting it online?

As fast as Kiya attracts anonymous affection for her gun-toting antics, YouTuber Burt Walden makes himself internet famous by posting a scathing reaction video.  Burt, played by Ian Nelson over-reading his lines with all the sneering sincerity of an Adam West “Batman” villain, accuses Kiya of being a fake, insignificant, fame-obsessed nobody.  Burt could not possibly be more on the money.

Much like the overall movie, Kiya can’t find the meaning in her life because there isn’t any to be found.  Claiming to be just 17, the audience learns nothing about Kiya’s origins.  Maybe she was orphaned.  Maybe she was abused.  Maybe she was bullied.  Maybe there aren’t any convenient hints to explain how/why she became the sociopath she is.

But “Like Me” is predominantly a character study.  And in the absence of any construct for sympathy, understanding, or motivation, the character it is studying is only a plain shell pushing plotlines without developing any discernibly complex personality at all.

Burt’s berating drives Kiya to step up the sadism.  Her next step involves seducing a lonely motel manager before tying him up and taking him captive.  Whatever Kiya does next depends on what she is dared, and how far she is willing to go to impress an intangible audience that is mostly an ideal in her mind.

“Like Me’s” rant on social media has mostly a “look, see!” mentality.  Material integrated into the story consists of observation of abhorrent actions and reactions with next to no actual analysis or conclusion about the content in question.  It’s like a comedian starting a bit with, “did you ever notice?” and then never following through with a punchline.

Presentation is equally incomplete in purpose.  The film occasionally freeze-frames before rocking a two-second sequence rapidly back and forth or splicing in shots of smiling mouths drooling pastel-colored fluids.  Then there are random jump cuts to non-sequitur clips of Popeye cartoons interspersed with hallucinogenic imagery like an animated eel writhing from a bullet wound in Larry Fessenden’s arm while Kiya drives frantically through a lava lamp storm.

Maybe the point is to be as pointlessly scatterbrained as many media-infatuated mindsets are.  Or maybe the only thematic value is whatever an individual infers in his/her head.

Either way, Robert Mockler misses the mark.  Social media has reached a saturation point, but public tolerance of its consumption has not.  Mockler’s schizophrenic visual style is primarily appealing to a millennial audience who is not near ready to have the camera turned back on culture that is still current.  That leaves “Like Me” in a limbo where even if it does have something to say, its cautionary message is shouted into an artistic void created by premature indecision.

Review Score:  40

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