Written & Directed by Quinn Shephard
Starring Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien, Mia Isaac, and Embeth Davidtz
Runtime: 1 hour and 42 minutes
Available on Hulu starting July 29th

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

Sometimes when you hurt people, you don’t get to be forgiven.

Perhaps more than any other modern subject, getting internet fame and infamy to feel authentic on screen is one of the hardest things. Anything that feels like it was written or conceived of without understanding of the very present ways in which people get famous online, and the intricacies of that, is off putting. Coupled with how quickly those platforms change and evolve, the approach to internet fame can feel stale instantly, even if it was correct at the time of its inception. 

Not Okay combats this by making the film much less about the mechanics of internet fame and infamy, and more about the age-old act of public shaming. Including the heightened emotions that lead up to it. 

Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch) works at a website as a photo editor, but she desperately wants to be a writer. In order to impress Colin (Dylan O’Brien), a weed-based influencer who she works with, she lies about going to Paris for a writers’ retreat. She takes time off work and uses her photo editing skills to pretend she’s in Paris on social media, despite just vegging out in her New York apartment. She posts a selfie in front of the Arc de Triomphe one night, accounting for time difference, before passing out without plugging her phone in. 

When she wakes up and charges her phone the next morning, she has about a million missed messages. There were, after all, a bunch of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, at famous monuments. Including the Arc de Triomphe, moments after she posted her Instagram photo. So, everybody in her life, and on social media, believes she survived a terrorist attack. She feels as though she can’t step back from the lie about being in Paris, and digs herself even deeper into a hole. She joins a support group where she meets Rowan (Mia Isaac), a school shooting survivor, who becomes close to her as Danni processes the trauma she doesn’t actually have.

Except… Danni starts to traumatize herself in the process. She doesn’t ever believe she was in the terrorist attacks or anything, but the stress of the lie and the perpetuation of it starts to wear her down. She starts seeing the hooded figure from the security footage, who authorities think planted some of the bombs. She has nightmares about if she’d actually been there and then, later, if Rowan had been there.

Now, I don’t think that Shephard is showing us Danni traumatizing herself for sympathy, necessarily. I actually think it’s, shockingly, understandable, in this deeply terrible and unforgivable way, that she continues to lie and even escalates the lie. And I think that understanding is why we’re seeing the actual trauma Danni is giving to herself, in real time. If you are a person who has been pretty actively online in the last ten years, and has seen how much online has become our real lives, then maybe you understand Danni’s choices too. It doesn’t mean condoning them or forgiving them, but I think it's part of the larger story that Shephard is trying tell about what we consider “normal” now. 

I think it would be fair, in some respects, to compare Not Okay to the 2017 film Ingrid Goes West. I think they’re cousins, in some ways. They’re both about people lying on social media, falling deeper and deeper into that hole, and then dealing with the fallout of those lies. Ingrid Goes West is about the toxic ways that social media have fed into our darkest obsessions, while Not Okay is about how little lies on public platforms can snowball and destroy your entire being. But I think it’s very clear that Not Okay is a film about women, written and directed by a woman. You can feel it in the way it's shot, in the writing of the characters and their choices, and in the specific direction of the story. 

Not Okay is having a conversation about the trauma of being online, of being perceived so much that it starts to wear you down until you feel like lying is the only way to be something. And I think it recognizes that even when people get ousted for their lies, and are publicly shamed, there’s always a space for them to return. Maybe not in exactly the same way, or to the same platform, but almost no one ever actually has their public lives completely ruined. Your private life, however? Good luck with that one. The public might forgive or tolerate your return, but no one you actively hurt is obliged to do the same. 

It’s something that I think Zoey Deutch and Mia Isaac really nail in this film. Despite all of the character choices, Deutch is charming in a way that really sells you on the empathy you need to have for the character, in order to make the movie work. And this is Isaac’s debut year—no, her debut month. Her first feature is the Amazon flick Don’t Make Me Go, where she stars opposite John Cho. Not Okay is coming out less than two weeks later, and she’s stunning as Rowan. Deutch and Isaac have a real chemistry that makes it so deeply sad that you know their relationship won’t be able to bounce back from this. 

What Danni has done is unforgivable. She made her only friend in the world because of it, but it was built on a lie. The film makes a brave, and ultimately honest, choice at the end. Even if the world lets you back in… no one else has to. You’ve done this to yourself and you have to be okay with that.