‘I Am Not Okay With This’ way beyond OK
New Netflix sci-fi teen drama brings together pitch-perfect actors and wry humor
Sydney is going through some of the usual trials of adolescence. School’s a drag, kids ignore her, she doesn’t get along with her mom.
She’s angry, a lot, and that happens to be a very special problem.
“I Am Not Okay With This” is her story, and it debuts Wednesday on Netflix.
The seven-part series was shot in and around Pittsburgh in 2019, and it’s easy to tell. Not since CBS All Access shot and set “One Dollar” around Western Pennsylvania has a setting looked so Yinzer n’at.
As played by Sophia Lillis, Sydney has a face that never seems at rest. She’s always nervously twisting her mouth or talking through a big fake smile. But, really, what is there to smile about?
Her father came home from war a changed man, paranoid and angry. He died a year ago. Her mother, Maggie (Kathleen Rose Perkins), is exhausted from working long days as a waitress. Like Syd, she’s still grieving. Little brother Liam is actually, well, cool. At least there’s that.
But then there’s the matter of weird things happening whenever Sydney loses her cool …
These are just small early warning signs that either Sydney has some sort of superpowers, or maybe she’s just lost her mind.
Jonathan Entwistle directed the entire seven-episode series, writing and producing as well. He has described it as “Carrie” set in a John Hughes universe, and that’s a fair assessment. Some of the creatives on the series also worked on the Netflix powerhouse “Stranger Things.”
The show is based on a far bleaker Charles Forsman graphic novel of the same name. With Entwistle’s previous Netflix entry — another startling Forsman-based series, “The End of the F***ing World — winning a 2019 Peabody Award, expectations appear high for “IANOWT.”
The two young leads, Lillis and Wyatt Oleff, who plays her geeky neighbor, Stan, seem poised to take it over the bar. She is the angry yin to his strange stoner yang as they try to figure out what’s happening to her amid the chaos of high school life. The actors are adorably awkward together.
Entwistle wisely grounds the series in entirely believable drama. In one scene, Sydney’s mom, Maggie, orders her daughter to take care of Liam after school because she has to work late.
“I’m practically his mom,” Sydney glowers as Maggie walks away. Her mother returns.
“What did you just say?” “You always ask me to do everything for Liam, and it’s not fair,” Sydney argues. “It’s not [pause] fair?”
“If Dad was here with me and Liam, he wouldn’t ask me to do so much.”
Maggie loses it: “To clarify, this is the scenario where I’m dead?”
It’s simple dialogue yet speaks volumes to their contentious relationship.
School is even harder for Syd to negotiate. In addition to her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), suddenly pretending that having the new boyfriend around isn’t tense, it turns out that said boyfriend is a horrible guy.
Sydney and Stanley hang out a lot together, but it’s clear she’d rather save her affections for Dina.
On top of it all, there is that underlying anxiety of having these unknown powers. Did her father have them? Couldn’t he cope? Are they going to drive her mad, too?
It’s no secret that something goes horribly, violently wrong for Sydney. It’s right there in the trailer, not to mention the opening moments of Episode 1.
She’s shown running down the street, covered in blood, with police car lights flashing in the distance.
In a teen screen Venn diagram, “I Am Not Okay With This” occupies a space somewhere between “Stranger Things,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Carrie” and Forsman’s original dark graphic novel. It’s definitely more mature in its themes than your average Netflix high school drama, and light-years better. Its pacing is deliberate, the humor wry. Justin Brown, the cinematographer for the first season of “TEOTFW” is back to bring the landscape to life.
Entwistle was once asked what happens when creative people from “Stranger Things” collide with his aesthetic from “The End of the F***ing World.”
“Just awesomeness, is what happens,” he said, laughing.
The man’s not wrong.