The best commercially aware American debut film I’ve seen since–I dunno, RESERVOIR DOGS?–just might be Meghan Weinstein’s THE INFLUENCER. It’s wonderfully paced and crafted, featuring a range of excellent and assured performances from unknown talent. But this isn’t an “art film,” and it wasn’t manufactured for the festival circuit like so many first features are these days. Instead, THE INFLUENCER is a full-throated, giddily energized commercial exercise that ticks every box on the contemporary straight-to-streaming dance card while transcending, arguing with and imploding the formulas through subversive comedy, assured farce, and a low-budget filmmaker’s sheer force of will.
All the more remarkable is that the most effective satire in this movie revolves around internet fame, a fat target movies have swung at for years without really hitting it. Real-life webrepreneur Kasia Szarek is Abbie Rose, a popular cosmetology influencer on the cusp of aging out of her demographic. She’s a raging narcissist, which Weinstein is shrewd enough to see as an asset for a vlogger, but she works her following hard, building her brand and searching eagerly for one big score.
That score comes in the form of a major sponsorship deal from Nutrocon, a surrogate for all the brand awfulness of the fashion world. Sure, Nutrocon is an environmental disaster, with a rapey corporate culture and a faux hipster vibe. It’s a company that would go against everything Abbie stands for, if Abbie was bothering to stand for anything other than empty Girl Power gesturalism. But they’re offering $400,000 to shill blush on Youtube, and Abbie just can’t say no.
Enter a social media Monkey Wrench Gang, the home-invading kidnappers Two, Three, Four and Five, who force entry, take Abby hostage and initiate a plan to use her social media profile for woke purposes of their unseen mastermind, inevitably codenamed One.
Weinstein and her all female crew have done an amazing job in making a good looking, tautly-paced movie on a shoestring–this is a frequently visually stylish film, where the low-budget seams barely show. But what really sets THE INFLUENCER apart is Weinstein’s writing, which is steeped in her own specific viewpoint, and powered by just enough outrage to keep the thinking part of a viewer’s mind nourished amidst all the plot twists, punchouts and punchlines.
Today’s low-budget genre movies tend to be the last bastion of a kind of unabashed masculinist viewpoint that’s fading everywhere else in the culture. They’re mostly exercises in running, jumping and standing still, with guns waving and revenge as the only storyline. Weinstein is after something strange and unique and revisionist–a feminist action comedy that finds a way to hurtle forward in a caper crime format while never rushing past the conversation it’s having about what it means to be a woman living inside the electronic hall of mirrors we all inhabit now.
The sad if understandable creative trajectory so many young filmmakers follow nowadays is to make a noteworthy and personal first film and then use it as leverage to land a Marvel or a DC movie or some other piece of franchise crap they’re supposed to ennoble with a stylistic signature. Weinstein is also unique in that, unlike a typical “art film” director, she arrives fully formed as a commercial creator. If Weinstein can work these kinds of wonders on a hundred grand, just imagine what she’d create with a hundred million. But there’s a voice here too, one that probably wouldn’t benefit from the corporate ventriloquism required to speak through Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel.
I’m told by her publicist that even as THE INFLUENCER debuts on Apple Plus, Amazon Prime and all their competition, Meghan Weinstein is already at work on her second low-budget feature as a director.
Long may she run.