Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) is a a young woman who doesn't understand how to socialize outside of her phone screen so she stalks the women she envies on social media. She imagines they are her friends. She wants to be the center of their world — the center of anyone's world, really, because in the wake of her mother's death, hers is so lonely.
Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) is an Instagram star, a well-off young woman whose fortune has allowed her to make a living by essentially creating a caricature of herself for thousands of casual fans to whom she advertises restaurants, boutiques, clubs. Her husband is an artist and her dream is to own a hotel called “Desert Door.” She is curated. She is the walking embodiment of kitsch.
Ingrid ends up in a mental institution after crashing a stranger's wedding (well, a stranger if you think about the world the old way), and when she gets out she finds Taylor. The fun, laid-back, "avocado-on-toast" L.A. Lifestyle? That's what Ingrid wants. That's what she needs. Becoming best friends with Taylor is the first step. So Ingrid goes west.
“Ingrid Goes West” is an engaging if uneven black comedy about the nature of friendship in a world where we're all addicted to the dopamine rush of immediate attention. At its best the film is a satirical take on how we make and perceive friendship in the early 21st century — as a commodity, a number, likes, comments. Communion devoid of community.
While the plot doesn't actually diverge much from the classic “loser wanting to become friends with the cool kid” story, Plaza takes it to another level. Her performance as Ingrid straddles the line between sympathetic and outright "Fatal Attraction," which is no easy feat. We know from the start that Taylor isn't what she seems to be, but Ingrid is so off-center that the tension comes from wondering what she'll do when she finds out. Ingrid's sympathetic, dangerous and wholly recognizable. I think we all, at some point or another, covet being the center of someone else's world — particularly when that other person's world seems so much more interesting than our own.
At the same time, Ingrid embodies a special kind of person in our new online social order — the person who probes the porous and ill-defined social boundaries of public celebrity, who gets too close too fast and never understands why. Taylor's no Kardashian, but her “job” cultivating minor celebrity is shared by professionals across many industries and professions. Sure, she's essentially just an advertising face — so are we all, now, in some form or another. She just gets paid for it.
And for every Taylor there are dozens of Ingrids. Sometimes they're looking for a friend, or to get laid, or to impress their friends, or to simply fill the aching void they feel at home every night after work or class or what-have-you. What makes Ingrid so interesting, compelling, uncomfortable is that she's the first character of her kind to leap off Instagram into a big-budget, Hollywood movie. We know her type. The most similar recent moviegoing experience I've had watching to watching Plaza in this? Jake Gyllenhaal in “Nightcrawler.”
The script by David Branson Smith and Matt Spicer is eager to compare the superficiality of Taylor's lifestyle with the one Ingrid lives online, but it never puts them on a the same moral playground. Things kind of go off the rails in the third act, and a conflict is introduced that test Ingrid's new status quo. It never feels natural, almost too Hollywood in all the wrong ways. These plot beats don't ruin the overall experience of the film, but they do weaken it, removing the character focus of the first two acts in favor of antics and plot and contrivance.
Despite the drift towards the end of the movie, Plaza makes the journey worthwhile.
It's a bit of a fallow period of movies. Summer is over and the autumn slate hasn't started up yet. That doesn't mean audiences in Indianapolis have to go wanting; "Ingrid Goes West" is one of the better indie comedies of the summer.