Not Okay Review: Showcasing Influencer’s Culture Unfiltered!

Not Okay is Quinn Shepard’s second feature movie following Blame, her 2017 Tribeca Film Festival contender. Having written the latter in 2015, around the age of twenty, Shepherd is a young filmmaker who has a lot more learning and experimenting to do. But, I cannot help but tip my hat off to her, as a 27-year-old woman from my home state of New Jersey, getting her films made and distributed. That said, Not Okay is a more fleshed-out film than her previous outing and has some hits and misses throughout.

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Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), a wannabe influencer, decides to use her photo editing talents to make her followers (and her new influencer crush Colin, played hilariously by Dylan O’Brien) believe she is in Paris, France on a writer’s retreat, when in reality she is sitting in her bed at home. But, when a terrorist bombing happens in Paris, Danni uses the event to propel her career by playing the innocent victim who survived the bombings.

Quinn Shephard provides some good commentary on influencers, cancel culture, and teenage advocacy. Being young herself, the script clearly shows her understanding of the obsession with being famous on social media, using events/social issues to capitalize your popularity off of, and the privilege of being a white woman in the digital age. Danni’s character is written realistically to show her stardom is the product of a society that thrives off of the “white woman victim” narrative.

Part of Not Okay on Hulu that works but is still a bit muddled is the fact that Shephard is in on the “joke” that her film focuses on a white female content creator as a filmmaker who has the same privilege, and is thus able to get her story out there. This is not to say the director does not deserve the platform she has (much the opposite, given she fully financed her first film using her own college fund), but she is understanding of how audiences may view the content in the movie given who she is as a filmmaker.

The character of Rowan (Mia Isaac), a young black activist doing the work that Danni is only pretending to do, feels like a character who deserves a voice much more. Although she is given a large voice in the film, she still is the counterpart to Danni in the end. Rowan is written beautifully, and I don’t fault Shepard for writing Danni as the lead, but it is an interesting discussion to be had as to whether it is up to those with a bigger voice to tell stories more “deserving” of others or if filmmakers should stick to the sides of the stories they know.

The script gets better as the film progresses but it did lack the development of some of its themes, including depression and survivors of violence. The question as to whether Danni’s depression should be taken into account to explain the rationality behind her terrible decisions is touched on briefly but never fully examined.

Danni is a depressed woman using other’s attention on social media to build her low self esteem up so should her mental health be taken into account when discussing her deception? It would have been interesting to see Shephard expand on this regardless of whether Danni should be given a redemption or not. I would suggest watching Not Okay in order to form your own opinions as there are certainly elements to commend in this film.

‘Not Okay’ Rating – 3/5

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