‘Luckiest Girl Alive’: Brutal, dark honesty
As I sit down to write about “Luckiest Girl Alive,” I find myself struggling to wrap my head around just how much to reveal. This film is twisted, though not in a Christopher Nolan sense. It’s brutal and dark, and there are some people who should absolutely avoid watching it.
I don’t write that the film should be avoided in a critical sense; it’s not as though the movie is overwhelmingly poor in quality. Rather, I think this film should come with the world’s biggest trigger warning given the times we live in and the subject matter this narrative tackles.
Netflix, to its credit, lists the reasons this film is rated R in a banner at the top of the screen as the movie starts, but I want to take it a step further. Do not watch “Luckiest Girl Alive” if you’re triggered by depictions of sexual assault or school shootings. Both are included in this movie without apology, and they are what I refer to explicitly when I call this a brutally honest film.
“Luckiest Girl Alive” is based on a 2015 novel by the same title written by Jessica Knoll, who also wrote the screenplay for this movie. The mystery drama slowly unwraps through a gruesome tale from Ani FaNelli (Mila Kunis), who is wound tight enough to snap at any moment, and rightfully so.
To the outside observer, Ani has the perfect life. She writes for a successful magazine and seems to be on her way to The New York Times Magazine. Ani is planning the perfect wedding to the wealthy, handsome Luke (Finn Wittrock). There’s just one giant thing haunting her steps.
An independent filmmaker keeps contacting her, asking Ani to participate in a documentary on a school shooting she survived as a girl. Until now, she has remained silent on the issue, trying to keep her distance, changing her name from Tiffani to Ani.
Since college, Ani has worked hard to shape herself into this self-professed windup doll.
“Wind me up, and I’ll say what you want to hear,” she says throughout the film. And I found myself consistently stressed and angry throughout the movie. More than once, I looked over at my wife and remarked how tense everything felt while watching “Luckiest Girl Alive.” When the movie reveals a school shooting isn’t the only traumatic event Ani survived as a child, the film takes on a renewed level of depravity.
As the film progresses, we’re given almost dual portraits for Ani. On the outside, she’s this restrained, petite socialite who can’t wait to get married and carry on with her life. On the inside, Ani is this rightfully furious and scorned woman who chafes at the suffocating identity she’s carefully crafted for herself in an attempt to be happy and bulletproof.
Her trauma, her untold story, and the pressure of this documentary are pushing Ani to a breaking point, and it quickly becomes apparent she’s struggling to keep her rage contained. She fights with Luke, she breaks down in the back of a taxi and starts kicking the AC vents, and she’ll think vicious thoughts about others, only to realize she accidentally spoke them aloud, creating horribly awkward social situations.
And while her best friend works damage control, writing these moments off as wedding planning pressure and exhaustion, the audience is the only one who knows how badly Ani is breaking on the inside.
“Luckiest Girl Alive” does an amazing and brutal job of showing instead of telling, with Chiara Aurelia playing a young Ani, the student at a private high school who gets swept up into a crowd of popular kids and lives through two horrific events, either of which would be enough to break a person.
This film leaves nothing to the imagination, and its star, Kunis, is easily the best part of the entire movie. She dives into the character of Ani so thoroughly from the razor wit of her inner narration to the calm wife-to-be. Kunis is the ultimate chameleon until her character just can’t handle the psychological load anymore and finally starts to question (with some help from her boss, Lolo, played by Jennifer Beals) if she’s truly happy.
The first two-thirds of “Luckiest Girl Alive” are full of Ani keeping herself in check and making choices based solely on what others want from her. When she finally pulls the mask off in the final third, it’s electrifying and empowering in all the best ways. By the end of the film, I was on my feet cheering for this unstoppable force.
One of Kunis’ best scenes comes from a pizzeria where she has, maybe, one slice to eat and proclaims herself full. With two slices left on the serving board, Luke asks for a to-go container and excuses himself to the restroom. In maybe 10 seconds, Ani gives herself what she truly wants, wolfing down both slices with the fury of Joey Chestnut.
When the waitress returns with the box, confused that the leftover pizza is gone, Ani tells her she can just clear off the table instead. Then Ani intentionally spills a little soda on her dress. So when Luke returns and asks where the leftovers are, she can lie and say the waitress spilled soda on the pizza and her clothing, ruining both. Ani remarks one more time on the way to the door how full she is, and Luke quizzingly says, “But you barely ate anything.”
This one scene quickly illustrates just how calculated and restrained a role Ani has crafted to have the “perfect life,” and Kunis portrays it spectacularly.
My only criticism for “Luckiest Girl Alive” comes in the form of a question on timing. Is this a film America needs right now? After ghastly school shootings like the one in Uvalde, which happened just five months ago, I think the question has to be asked. For a story in which a school shooting is so prominently featured and shown, does this film re-victimize shooting survivors in recent years?
I guess that’s a larger discussion to be had within film criticism as we have movies like “The Fallout” and now “Luckiest Girl Alive” dramatizing these nightmare scenarios. Maybe the brutal depictions of an all-too-real act of violence will finally spur some action to make school shootings an uncommon tragedy in the U.S.
I’m just a simple gal from small-town Arkansas, so I don’t have the answer to these questions. But I do think it’s worth asking, no matter how well these films are crafted.
“Luckiest Girl Alive” is available on Netflix today.