Luckiest Girl Alive Review: A Psychological Drama To Discover Yourself Netflix Film | Filmyhype
Cast: Mila Kunis, Connie Britton, Jennifer Beals, Justine Lupe, Scoot McNairy, Finn Wittrock, Chiara Aurelia
Director: Mike Barker
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Luckiest Girl Alive is a 2022 film directed by Mike Barker and written and scripted by Jessica Knoll. The production is by Bruna Papandrea, Jeanne Snow, Erik Feig and Lucy Kitada. It is available on Netflix from 7 October 2022. This is yet another story about an abused girl trying to come to terms with what happened to her. Compared to other similar films, however, this one has something more, which others often lack complexity. A project that sees Mike Barker as director and Knoll herself as the screenplay. While to give a more tangible face to the complex personality of Ani, the protagonist with different names and personalities is Mila Kunis. She was entrusted with the difficult task of interpreting not only a central character but the fulcrum of the whole story that, starting from a traumatic event, goes to plumb the many and mysterious processes that the mind uses to overcome pain and face the memory of an indelible experience.
A style that, in some way, owes a lot to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Literary references aside, however, the winning key of this novel is represented by an important narrative substrate that, page after page, reveals an inner and outer reality that is increasingly shocking and shared. Aspects of these must also have attracted the leaders of Netflix so much so that they are committed to the cinematographic transposition of this story which will be visible in streaming from 7 October. One of these is the denial that, through external modification of the body, tries to erase what has been in favor of a new version of oneself. But will it be possible to forget and proceed towards a path devoid of negative memories or experiences? Let’s try to find out with our review of Luckiest Girl Alive.
Luckiest Girl Alive Review: The Story
Ani is a young woman looking to make a career as a journalist in New York. It would seem a very difficult task, after all, the press is facing a period of crisis, but Ani is willing to do anything, she is skilled and ambitious and over the years she has built a character that works perfectly. Although coming from a medium-low background, she has reached the top: she is about to marry the perfect guy, a real Ken of privilege. She will be her Barbie. Everything has been decided. A somewhat pernicious documentary maker, however, enters her life. He is investigating the shooting in high school, just as Ani was also attending. Her schoolmates have suggested over the years that she was directly involved in the crime. She has never stated anything. The documentary would be her first time, her redemption opportunity, to explain what happened.
Yes, because not everything is as it seems. Before the shooting, organized by two boys who were friends of Ani who for years had suffered the abuses of the so-called popular, also our protagonist had met the same fate. At a party, drunk, she was raped by the three golden boys, the same ones targeted during the shooting, the same ones that Dean is part of, the perfect survivor, the boy with high hopes who now, in a wheelchair, has dedicated his life to fight against guns and to try to convince public opinion to demand stringent control over the matter. Luckiest Girl Alive as well as being a beautiful story of redemption is also the story of a girl who was abandoned by those around her. A girl who was ashamed, who did not have the support of her mother, who for years was dominated by the culture of rape and who thought that the solution was to go ahead, grit her teeth, put herself in a position of superiority and economic security but also of prestige that protected her from her past and from what her past had done to her mind.
From the very first images, it is clear that the film focuses its attention exclusively on the character of Ani Fanelli. In front of us is a young woman with a small body, big dark eyes, minimal chic style clothes, and a strong personality. Everything suggests that she is one of the many successful professionals who populate the crowded sidewalks of New York. A reality also confirmed by a precious engagement ring that stands out on her hand. Not to mention the good-looking future husband who belongs, as if that were not enough, to the high society of the city. In short, if someone looked from the outside Ani would think of a happy and satisfied girl, engaged in her profession as a journalist and the next happy bride. The reality, however, is quite different. As she wanders with her boyfriend among the China and glasses on display at Williams Sonoma to compile the perfect wedding list, her mind can only visualize the flashes of a seemingly faded memory where violence, however, seems to have had the better.
The reflection of a distant past in which Ani was called Tiffany and her appearance was very different. Light years away from the refined woman of today, during her teens, she had to deal with a busty and feminine body. Forms that have always identified her with the precarious economic conditions in which she lived compared to her classmates. A body that was barely contained in the uniform of the wealthy institute to which she had been admitted for merit and which reflected a distorted image of her. Those were the worst years for Tiffany who, after surviving a murderous act by a friend of hers, led her to want to build a new version of herself. And it is during a school trip to New York that she discovers what it means to be a woman of power, well-dressed, refined, and too busy to be touched by drama and pain. An awareness that represents the spark from which she is generated by Ani, an ambitious young journalist characterized by artificial thinness since she hasn’t touched carbohydrates for six years. Her perfect facade, however, is destined to be challenged by the returning past. The same one who will give the young Tiffany voice back. But not all evil comes to harm. Looking back or, if you want, within yourself, will help you finally find a true and definitive image.
Luckiest Girl Alive Review and Analysis
As has already been mentioned, this story has the structure of a psychological drama with a hint of a thriller which, however, soon loses its potential as the tension is diluted rather quickly. Despite this strong focus on the character’s interiority, therefore, the narrative focuses much of its attention on the external elements. In this way, an inverse trend is constructed in which from the outside one comes to determine and tell the interiority with the many torments of him. In this structure, therefore, the body gains a central role, since it defines the character of Tiffany and her transformation into Ani. A change that is not based on purely aesthetic reasons but seeks recognition and social respectability. From this point of view, the film uses the contrasting relationship with exteriority, which involves a large part of the female world, to define, one step at a time, the lines of a deeply private drama.
For Ani, her past forms represented an obstacle between the actual nature and the external image. As if that were not enough, then, that precocity represents the memory of a deep shame. After suffering violence during a high school party, a gradual but constant process of denial begins, which takes its first steps from the aesthetic transformation. Through the reduction of weight or breasts, we want to describe a process of erasing memory. With a new body, the violated young Tiffany rises from her ashes and becomes Ani, strong, successful and aware. The victim is finally in control of her destiny while maintaining absolute control over her entire existence. But what to do if this involves silencing her inner voice and transforming herself into a kind of wind-up doll, capable only of meeting the expectations of others? At that point, there are only two alternatives: to continue to be deaf to oneself or to accept the risk of looking at what has been hidden up to that moment.
Within a rather simple structure that certainly leaves no room for surprise or interpretative virtuosity, the film allows itself the time and space to touch on topics that are particularly hot for American society. And not only. The great advantage, then, is that this happens without any kind of didactic attitude or moral subtext. Rather everything is told through a substantial “normality”, using the protagonist’s personal experience to give a reason for being to all this pain. The triggering element of all the involution and subsequent evolution of Ani, therefore, is the violence of the group which, also represented by the subsequent school massacre, tells of a dangerously extreme youth condition. A situation profoundly based on social division, thanks to which some seem to be allowed everything. In some cases, however, the space between the victim and executioner is dangerously filled, transforming the former into a potential detonation weapon. In other cases, however, those who have suffered turn the greatest hatred only and exclusively towards themselves.
However much you decide to remain silent and ignore, there comes a point where you need to define yourself as a victim to finally start living again. All these elements that the screenplay, created by Jessica Knoll herself, manages to balance without dwelling on visual sensationalism but using the trick of memory to travel between past and present, pain and negation, light and shadow. In all this movement, then, Ani is perfectly in the middle of her despite her wearing different clothes and different characteristics. A time traveler in her pain, she seems destined never to fully enjoy the future. At least not until she admits to herself that she inhabited her past.
Luckiest Girl Alive Review: The Last Words
Based on the novel by Jessica Knoll, the film follows the trend of the book without making major directorial solutions. Despite this rather traditional course of the narrative, however, attention is still captured by the character of Ani who, through the lights and shadows of her two existences, builds an emotional and intense journey between the sufferings and insecurities of the female world. Luckiest Girl Alive is a layered film that tries to problematize important issues. A story of redemption but also food for thought.
