This film contains flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist. Viewer discretion advised.”
This is the disclaimer that appears at the very beginning of Not Okay, and it is one that turned out to be more literal than I originally anticipated. Surely this is a dig at those misogynistic souls out there that dislike female protagonists when they are “too strong” or “too independent,” right? Nope. As it turns out, the main character of Not Okay, Danni, is actually pretty dang unlikeable. This warning also turns out to be a good indicator of the film’s mixture of comedy and heavy themes, a concoction that often works quite well but occasionally left me wishing that some of the commentary offered was more than skin-deep.
When our protagonist devises a relatively benign lie in order to score some easy internet points and be seen for once, things quickly spiral out of her control when that lie leads everyone to believe that she is a survivor of a terrorist attack. Happy with the attention that she receives from a social media-obsessed society, Danni goes along with it and plays the victim. Things turn out about as well as you’d expect. It’s an uncomfortably salient premise and one that is often hard to watch, although writer/director Quinn Shephard and star Zoey Deutch do an admirable job at making things bearable, if rarely pleasant. There are very few likeable people in Not Okay, but just enough humanity and humor pokes through to make the viewer at least invested in what happens to Danni, if not cause them to actually root for her at times before the reality of the horrible thing she is doing comes crashing down.
And come crashing down it does. Not Okay pulls no punches when the truth inevitably comes out, and any comedy that has existed before then is quickly shooed out the door in favor of some hard-hitting and downright depressing consequences for everyone involved. There is a glimmer of hope at the end as Danni decides to do something solely for someone else’s benefit for a change, but ultimately Not Okay is a downer of massive proportions.
The biggest issue I had with the film was that it didn’t commit to or explore some themes as much as it could have. We find out early on that Danni has some underlying mental health issues that help lead her to make the poor decisions that she does, but the film never really explores this. Similarly pushed to the side is Danni's friend and actual tragedy survivor, Rowan (played my Mia Isaac), who I wish we would have spent more time getting to know. And while Not Okay does a pretty good job of juggling the ideas of Danni as a victim and Danni as a villain who willingly does her part to perpetuate the toxicity of social media, it occasionally drops the ball and asks us to empathize too much or too little.
Ultimately Not Okay does an admirable job at saying something important, even if the journey to get there is ultimately unpleasant. When it comes to snapshots of where we are as a society and where we need to go, you can do much worse.
Not Okay is now available on Hulu.
This review was first published in the Keizertimes on September 16th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
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