Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) is obsessed with Instagram. She attacks her 'friend' Charlotte who didn't invite her to her wedding. She is sent to treatment but she is still obsessed with Instagram. This time, it's internet star Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). Upon release, Ingrid decides to head west to L.A. to meet Taylor IRL.

This starts off a little quirky. There is a darkness that builds up to that compelling little party where Nicky starts revealing the truth. Ezra's blackmail brings the movie to a whole new level. The movie is building to some really dark stuff. I may not buy Ingrid's plan but I do like where it goes. Just as the situation threatens to go off the rails, Ingrid pulls it back for some reason. It's out of her character. She definitely should go for the most unreasonable course of action. All right, I'll say it. She needs to kill Ezra. She needs to ramp up the crazy even more. The movie demands it. Instead, it stops short and tries to wrap it up with a feel good lesson. It's not Ingrid from the wedding. It needs to fully embrace its darkness.

I was recommended this film by a colleague at work who was another film enthusiast, I heard about it beforehand, and I read about the plot, it did sound like something worthwhile. Basically, in Pennsylvania lives mentally unstable young woman Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza). She discovers on Instagram that she was not invited to the wedding of her unrequited friend Charlotte (Meredith Kathleen Hagner),so she crashes the reception and pepper sprays Charlotte in the face. Ingrid spends some time in a mental hospital, and it turns out she was under the assumption that she and Charlotte were friends, after she liked a comment of hers on Instagram. Following her release, Ingrid is informed that her mother has died, and she inherits $62,000. Reading a magazine, she sees an article about social media influencer Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen),and becomes fascinated with everything she posts. Ingrid writes a comment on one of Taylor's posts and is delighted to later receive a response from Taylor. She decides to withdraw her inheritance and moves to Los Angeles, renting a house in Venice from Dan Pinto (O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Ice Cube's son),an aspiring screenwriter and Batman fanatic. She visits Taylor's regular hangouts and restaurants hoping to bump into her and gets a makeover in her style, also creating a new Instagram profile with the handle @ingridgoeswest. Eventually, Ingrid finds Taylor in a bookstore, and follows her home. Ingrid kidnaps Taylor's dog, Rothko, and she gets her opportunity to meet Taylor when she puts up "lost dog" posters in the neighbourhood. Ingrid "returns" Rothko to Taylor and her husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn's son); she refuses to accept the reward money but accepts their invitation to dinner. The next day, Ingrid asks Dan to borrow his truck to help Taylor move some items to her home in Joshua Tree, on the condition that she return it and to take part in a table read of his screenplay. Ingrid tells Taylor that the truck is her boyfriend's, and they stay out late and party. Ingrid ignores Dan's numerous texts and calls, and on the way back, drives under the influence and damages the truck. The following morning, Dan is furious with Ingrid for damaging his truck and forcing him to cancel the table read. Ingrid's friendship with Taylor grows as they begin to regularly hang out at galleries, restaurants, and shops. After a while, Ingrid arrives at Taylor and Ezra's house and unexpectedly meets Taylor's recovering drug addict brother Nicky (Billy Magnussen),who is cold toward Ingrid. Taylor dismisses her previous plans with Ingrid to attend a party with Nicky, furthering Ingrid's disdain for him. Taylor and Nicky tease Ingrid about her "imaginary" boyfriend Dan, whom they have never met. They invite Ingrid to a party hosted by fashion blogger Harley Chung (Pom Klementieff) and tell her to bring Dan. Ingrid apologises to Dan for her wrongdoing, promising to make it up to him and takes him to dinner. During dinner, they bond over their past losses, and later they have sex and begin a relationship. Ingrid invites Dan to Harley's party and asks him to tell everyone he's her boyfriend, but not to talk about Batman. Once there, Ingrid becomes envious of Taylor and Harley's friendship. After a conversation with Ezra, Ingrid begins to realise that several aspects of Taylor's persona are fabricated. Nicky finds Ingrid's phone that reveal her obsession with Taylor with incriminating photographs and blackmails her for money. In retaliation, Ingrid pays a stranger to punch her in the face, and convinces Dan that Nicky did it, but not to call the police. Instead, she convinces him to kidnap and terrorise Nicky to keep him quiet. Nicky escapes his bonds and attacks Dan, but Ingrid attacks him with a crowbar. Ingrid rushes Dan to the hospital and leaves Nicky unconscious in the desert. Later, Ingrid sees on Instagram that Taylor and Ezra went to Joshua Tree. She tries to find them, and calls Taylor many times, without success. Eventually Ezra answers Taylor's phone, he tells Ingrid that Nicky has told them everything, that Taylor does not want to hear from Ingrid again, or they will go to the police. Desperate, Ingrid moves into the small house next door to Taylor but using the last of her inheritance she struggles to pay the bills, until she loses power in the house. During Halloween, Ingrid sees a party occurring at Taylor's, she dons a bed sheet and crashes the party to charge her phone. When discovered, Ingrid berates Nicky, Ezra, and Taylor. Taylor tells her their friendship was a façade, and suggests Ingrid needs professional help. Depressed, Ingrid returns to her home, surrounds herself with lit candles, and records a video for her Instagram page, admitting that everything she was fake, revealing her true self, before attempting suicide by overdosing on pills. Ingrid survives after Dan sees the video and calls emergency services. She wakes in the hospital to learn that her video has gone viral, and thousands of strangers have responded to her hashtag #iamingrid to show support, which she is delighted with. Also starring Hannah Pearl Utt as Nicole, Joseph Breen as Garth Lafayette, and Angelica Amor as Cindy. This film absolutely belongs to Plaza, who is highly convincing as the unbalanced but sympathetic social-media-obsessed stalker, while Olsen as her "perfect" influencer "friend", and Jackson Jr. as the Batman obsessive, are great support. You could argue that this is more serious than funny, it also has a dark atmosphere almost entirely throughout, but the social media world is a scary place, an effective and interesting black comedy drama. Worth watching!

How would Ingrid operate if not for social media? It occurs to me watching this movie that social media, especially Instagram where pictures probably tell much more about one's life (and with those ever-so leading tells from the little description under the picture, with those hashtags saying the most in the briefest visual communication),doesn't create people to become more isolated and depressed and incensed, but it certainly doesn't do much to help.

In the case of Ingrid, she is someone for who following someone on Instagram is the lifeline into their lives, and if it doesn't create those who are on the outside and need help and don't have it, it exploits it for her. It's possible she could have seen the article about Taylor, the Elizabeth Olsen character - but it's not very likely *Taylor* would have become known as "The Best Friend," seemingly every-so hip and trending, but also a welcome mat for... those who are looking for a friend!

This is one of thoseultra-no-light-whatsoever-black comedies, and it's comedic because we can recognize that low pit of loneliness and despair and cringe along with everyone else as things become intense and estranged and obfuscation and the truth collide (or some of us can - if possible maybe some are secretly more like Taylor, hiding who they are to be much cooler than they really are - or even Taylor's significant other Ezra, who quits his job to become an artist but doesn't sell anything, or maybe Dan is more like it, the would-be screenwriter inspired by Batman Forever - stroke of genius, by the way, that he is *not* inspired by The Dark Knight - or maybe one or two are Taylor's brother Nicky, a real bastard who at least doesn't pretend *too* much about who he is as a character out of a Brett Easton Ellis novel).

In other words, Ingrid Goes West does involve, on paper, one of those psycho-stalker women who we usually see becoming attached to the presumably more together other woman, but that's where the similarities between those kind of movies (mostly) end. The tone is set at the beginning for what one assumes is someone who is off the deep-end as Ingrid f***s with another girl on her wedding. Why this happens is less important than what comes immediately after as she's put into psychiatric care. Will she try to better herself? Hardly, but it would seem like she's not exactly dangerous... at least, not so right away. I'd say there's a bit of the Rupert Pupkin in her, but I'm not sure if she is precisely trying to be *famous* like he was, or has that goal - or, to rephrase it, the goals of Pupkin then and Ingrid now are and aren't the same.

Ingrid sees a way of life and wants to have something as close to that as possible (through certain means that come through a believable plot contrivance, if that makes sense, she doesn't have to work right away and can use the pad via O'Shea Jackson's Batman friend),but it's more than anything about... being friends with someone. It's a fascinating dynamic since the movie is in a large way about her trying to figure out if what Taylor has is what she *really* wants or to have an authentic connection. While Matt Spicer's film (from his and Branson Smith's script) has a lot of wildly funny moments - sometimes through sheer surprise of 'That's genuinely f****ed' but also other times through the simple act of capturing behavior in a wonderfully, insanely exaggerated way - it's about deeper concerns that happen for people who don't, necessarily, have a psycho-stalker hanging around them in the LA hipster-ish-arts scene.

The Instagram and social media aspect is the key; we use these conduits to connect together and, indeed, to show people how we're living our lives (sometimes, as is mentioned casually and briefly but importantly, sometimes if one is lucky one gets *paid* to post such things online like a sponsor, hence Taylor's photography),but it also lessens how to truly connect to a person. I don't imagine Ingrid's mother, who is dead by the start of the movie, used social media, and this is a relationship that mattered a lot and sort of broke Ingrid further than she had been before (I don't also imagine she was ever exactly part of any cliques exactly, but she did have *someone* to connect with face to face on a fundamental level). So by the time a final, crucial confrontation occurs, sort of right before the climax but in the midst of it, what both sides say is true about the other.

Oh, and I should mention about now that the acting here is terrific. Plaza, to be sure, is the stand-out and continues a scorching-all-she-sees hot streak from her recent run on the show Legion (which, in a rather odd way, this *could* be a tangential prequel to, in way, maybe, sorta, I dunno),and she delivers on the awkward/harsh comic timing, and yet more-so on the dramatic level. But while without her, perhaps, the movie doesn't work as well, Olsen and Jackson and even Russell for a couple of crucial scenes stand out as well; Olsen, especially, gets to have a kind of character I'm not sure she's played before, or at least like this, and the layers to her are subtler to go for, and she digs in as much as she can (in a sense her character's most honest time, ironically, is when she's bonding with Ingrid on a drunken/coke-filled free for all, you'll find out why this is, and it makes for an awesomely peculiar dynamic).