In 2022, things are slowly but surely beginning to look up when it comes to women’s representation in television and cinema. The numbers are starting to look better than what they used to be decades ago, and with that comes a slew of new work that does a much better job of capturing the feminine experience than its predecessors in the same genres. While some of these movies and shows are truly progressive in the way that they authentically women, others have not been as successful. In the era of #MeToo, films are skirting around the notions of female empowerment and revenge against the patriarchal, wealthy systems in place, and relish giving their women protagonists the chance to upend said systems. Netflix now seeks to further these conversations with the release of its newest film: Luckiest Girl Alive.
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Based on a 2015 novel by the American author Jessica Knoll, the rights for the film were acquired by Lionsgate and Reese Witherspoon in the same year the novel came out. Knoll would write the screenplay for the movie, adapting her novel for the screen personally. Filmed in Toronto and New York City, the film explores the traumas and life of its main character Ani, and how she navigates trying to concoct the perfect narrative for her to live inside. Mila Kunis stars as Ani. She is joined by a cast including Finn Wittrock, Scoot McNairy, Chiara Aurelia, Thomas Barbusca, Carson MacCormac, and Justine Lupe, among many others. Luckiest Girl Alive first appeared in select theaters a week before its streaming release on Netflix.
Discovering What One Really Wants in Life
Netflix
In Luckiest Girl Alive, the facts are laid down immediately. Its protagonist is Ani, who, in the year 2015, is about to get married in six weeks. The opening scene shows her fiancé and her picking out the best cutlery, and she says to him, smirking, that they need to pick out something that isn’t dull. If this moment does not strike one as odd, it only serves as a warning for what is to come when the knives she is holding are now dripping in blood. Ani seems to live the perfect New York City life in 2015. She has a position in the editorial industry for an established magazine, is about to get married, and lives the life many dreams of when they imagine being a fashionable woman in the big city. This is not Sex and the City, though, and there is a lot of baggage in Ani’s life.
Everything about her perfect life starts to unravel when a director of a true crime documentary tracks Ani down. Up until this point, the movie suggests there is unresolved trauma in Ani’s life, as she has flashbacks whenever she holds knives, and during a quick trip on the subway, the lights go out, and she nearly has a panic attack. As she sits down across from the director in her office, he reveals the documentary’s subject is gun violence in schools, and viewers know now Ani’s high school had an incident when she was attending in 1999. The documentary has just brought on a new witness to be interviewed, and, as Ani looks him up, it turns out that he is accusing her of being involved with the shooting.
The cracks in Ani’s facade begin to fall apart after this pivotal scene. Her real name is not Ani; it is TifAni. She attended her high school, which catered to elite and wealthy students, on a writing scholarship, suggesting that she is not from wealth—unlike the persona she adopts in her New York City lifestyle. Ani changed her name to try and escape from the fallback created by the shooting, but it haunts in her everything she does. It is why she eventually agrees to join the documentary and be interviewed: she does not want to be anonymous anymore. After a woman mistakes her for someone else inside a clothing store, she makes the spontaneous decision to join the documentary to try and continue climbing in the world.
More details continue to spill out from the depths of Ani’s past. Following the trajectory of the novel the movie is based on, Ani’s memories include a gang rape led by her male classmates, leading her to become bullied and ostracized from the rest of her peers. The irony of her being an editor about sex tips furthers this horrifying detail, especially considering she was branded as a liar because she was denied any validity of what happened to her. Throughout the movie, she confronts that maybe her reality is not what she wanted. Blamed by her mother, the classmate who caused her so much harm, and the world for what had happened to her. Although the trajectory she had concocted as a high schooler looking to escape the world she was confined to now looks a lot different, Ani is learning to be okay with what the future holds.
Related: Do Revenge Review: A Story That Spins Out of Orbit
An Unbalanced Look At Its Protagonist’s Journey
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At times, Luckiest Girl Alive feels like it wants to become Gone Girl, but lacks both the dramatic tension and chops to pull it off. At other times, the visuals lean more towards The Neon Demon, albeit without the horror elements of that film. The voiceover narration done by Kunis’ character hints at a more snarky, contrived nature from the very beginning, making it more obvious by the time it digs into her backstory that she is not as squeaky clean as she appears to be on the surface. The first break in her act is when her fiancé, Luke, leaves their restaurant table and Ani shoves the rest of his leftovers — a single slice of pizza — into her mouth before he comes back and sees it. And it is this moment that sets the tone for the rest of the movie, as Ani struggles with who she is — something that we, the viewers, do not get to see much of even at the very end — and the identity she has constructed to get ahead in life.
But as a movie Luckiest Girl Alive feels too hollow, too contrived. Films like The Fallout have taken the subject of school shootings and their psychology on the students involved and set the bar high for what kind of content audiences should and can expect. Other recent movies, like Netflix’s Do Revenge, also tackle the premise of elite high school bullying and what happens when certain privileged men are elevated to appear like they are championing a cause that they helped perpetuate. However, while Ani does get to enact her ultimate revenge and elevate her status by finally coming clean with what happened that fateful day, the movie’s approach depicts her as victorious and having finally found her identity. But at what cost? She admits she hurt and used people to get here, including her fiancé, and this is seen as okay because of the montage of diverse women towards the end praising her bravery.
What Ani did, by telling her story in full detail, is indeed brave. There is no denying that and the significance of victims telling their stories. But, perhaps, Luckiest Girl Alive could have found a better balance with balancing out Ani’s internal identity crisis and the story of what happened to her. Her act of revenge ultimately ends up feeling rushed in the film’s final arc, leaving a whirlwind of emotion, talk shows, and the people, including Ani’s mother, that were left behind in her redemption arc. Ani’s rise to getting what she wanted, to begin with, is marked with tragedy and the stains of death and despair, but viewers are denied the opportunity to see the impacts of what this really looks like outside of people singing her praise and criticizing her for having fifteen minutes of fame.
Luckiest Girl Alive offers a promising take on some of the most horrific events many women and youths face today but ultimately fails in its execution. Kunis does an incredible job slipping into the character of Ani, really tapping into the crises this young woman faces as she approaches a new chapter in her life. But, by the end of the day, this story would have been done justice if it was allowed more time and room to breathe in a miniseries. In its current form, it feels a tad sensationalized and not enough to keep one wanting to watch it further, and begins like it is simply too much.
Luckiest Girl Alive is available to stream on Netflix as of October 7, 2022.
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