‘Profile’
Producer Adam Sidman is quite possibly onto something. In the internet/social media age, storytelling, like culture in general, can be fractured, splintered into hundreds of screen-based micro-moments, and parsed out over a computer desktop in a dizzying series of texts, video chats, emails and other social media ephemera. Entire films can be made without ever leaving the confines of someone’s laptop. It might sound exhausting to watch, but, of course, it’s also the way a good number of us already live our hectic, deskbound, day-to-day lives.
In the past seven years, Sidman has taken the idea of these, what we might call, click narratives and explored several different genre possibilities. In 2014 he produced the quasi-horror flick “Unfriended,” in 2018 he made the sleuthing thriller “Searching” (a missing-daughter drama that’s an excellent example of the form and surprisingly engrossing). In them, he captures the kind of frantically paced, endlessly interrupted on-screen narratives that, especially in the age of covid, make up the majority of what passes for daily human interaction for many of us.
Sidman’s latest production, “Profile,” directed by Timur Bekmambetov, isn’t exactly new (it was originally finished in 2018), but it still feels mostly technologically relevant (although it likely won’t for long — it’s already glaring in its lack of TikTok references). It’s another thriller, of a sort, in which a young British journalist in London, hunting for a story, goes undercover as a recent convert to Islam on Facebook, hoping to find out how so many young British women get radicalized and move to Syria to be with their jihadist seducers.
Based on a novel by Anna Erelle, the story is set in 2014 and follows a freelance TV journalist named Amy (Valene Kane), who wants to impress her hard-driving editor Vick (Christine Adams) by posing as a young Muslim on social media in an attempt to gain the attention of the jihadists responsible for taking hundreds of young British women to Syria, where they are quickly subsumed by heavily patriarchal movement (at one point, Amy clicks onto a BBC story about how these hapless victims quickly get turned into “sex slaves” — a story she eventually shares with her recruiter who shrugs that there are “a few bad apples” in every cause).
No sooner does Amy create her fake profile — for a young woman she dubs “Melody Nelson” — then she gets greeted by a man who calls himself Abu Bilel (Shazad Latif), who wants very much to meet with her on Skype. Fit and handsome, Bilel puts on a full charm offensive to Amy-as-Melody, who is recording the call with help from Lou Karim (Amir Rahimzadeh), an IT guy from the network whose mother also happens to be Syrian. It is Lou who tells her, soon before she first meets Bilel on a video chat, she needs to cover her finger tattoo if she wants to seem devout.
Through a hyper-paced blur of texts, skypes, emails, and reminder alerts (Amy, it turns out, is hurting for rent money, no small factor as a freelancer looking for a big story), the story continues, as Amy and Bilel press on with their peculiar courtship. Bilel is shown in various parts of Syria, near the battlefield, playing soccer in the dust, firing his rifle into the sky, always, relentlessly pushing Melody to open up to him more (he peppers nearly every sentence with “baby” in an intonation that grates on your nerves like a microplane).
As the relationship progresses — time, as represented on the computer screen, becomes more fluid, and our only indication as to its passing is from the series of daily folders Amy keeps, recording each day’s contacts with Bilel — the amount of time she spends as Melody seems to overtake her sense of self. As Bekmambetov, who cowrote the script, would have it, Bilel’s smooth, cheesy patter quickly breaks down Amy’s defences. Soon, she’s eschewing Lou’s attempts to monitor her interactions with him, ignoring the calls and texts from her boyfriend
Matt (Morgan Watkins), and blowing off both Vick, and her friends. When, later on, it appears Bilel has gotten seriously hurt in a bomb blast, it’s not just Melody who collapses on the ground in hysterics, it’s Amy, having seemingly lost her objectivity entirely.
It’s not impossible to imagine how a young, wayward soul might get seduced by a handsome, charismatic recruiter who fills her head with a sense of purpose and promises of devoted love (“We have everything here,” Bilel tells Melody, “you’ll love it!”), and in this, the attractive, personable Latif is well-cast, but it is pretty difficult to believe a seasoned reporter with what seems like a perfectly good life (and a bonnie dog!) could be broken down that quickly, to the point where she’s poised to chuck her Western life behind. Simply put, it doesn’t track.
It is with this ambiguity that the film loses steam. One of the tricks of this method of storytelling is to show the state of mind of the protagonist via their on-screen behaviors (early on, Amy anxiously types possible responses to Bilel’s entreaties several different ways, before erasing them, unsure of the best possible answers to his questions), the way they switch frantically from app to app, or hesitate before typing out a response. It’s as close as we get to a sense of their interior state of mind, but this kind of subtle emotional shading is not much help when a character begins to vacillate as wildly as Amy does over the course of the 26 days she meets with Bilel (we see much of the film via older, recorded files from a desktop folder that get replayed for us), going from objective reporter, to swooning convert, and back again, backand-forth, depending on who happens to be responding to her first.
There are hints of turmoil from her childhood: She tells Bilel she lost her mother to a suicide after a bad business deal, but there’s nothing we can see from her various open windows and Google queries why her sense of self would be so fragile as to be seduced by such an obvious smarmy playboy as Bilel, nor why she would actually take him up on his offer to travel to Amsterdam in order to meet with him in Turkey.
A better film could make a more compelling case for itself, showing the ways Bilel and his ilk expertly mine a potential victim’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to their own ends, and putting the audience in the position, via Amy’s humming desktop, to understand the mental gyrations she was undergoing, but the film falters in these key moments — never more pronounced than when Bilel actually proposes to Melody/ Amy, after she was convinced he had been killed, a moment you would imagine that would shock her back into a sense of reality, but instead leads her to crack in the other direction — which inadvertently reveals the limitations of the form. As smooth and peculiarly engaging as it is, it’s not quite yet capable of capturing the more ambiguous subtleties of the human condition. It’s a popular Facebook post with a bunch of likes, but not much in the way of context.