It’s an enduring paradox that for as much time as we spend on the internet – narrativizing ourselves, intaking others, dissecting content into takes and memes – very few films accurately capture the experience of social media or the head-scrambling velocity of being online. Recent attempts have fallen flat, either into cheap, simple didacticism (Mainstream’s message of internet = bad) or Zola’s hazy, languorous adaptation of what was a punchy viral Twitter thread. The good ones –Eighth Grade, Ingrid Goes West, Searching – have managed to convincingly portray the warping force of the digital world through maladaptations of human behavior, with a grasp on a specific micro-era of digital culture.
Not Okay, written and directed by 27-year-old Quinn Shephard, aims squarely for the title of “internet film”. Its protagonist, friendless twentysomething Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), works as a photo editor at a Refinery29/Buzzfeed-esque digital media company called Depravity. Her bedazzled phone is totem, oracle, companion – she clutches it near constantly, pecks at it listlessly in her dark Brooklyn apartment. With her two platinum hair streaks and candy-colored rings, Deutch, who is also 27, looks like a Zoomer, and Danni calls herself a “zillennial”, but her obsession with social media perfection and becoming a New York writer feel distinctly millennial.
