Luckiest Girl Alive review: Mila Kunis impresses in bleak, brutal mystery with half-baked message

Language: English with Hindi audio option

There’s trauma and there’s trauma porn. _Luckiest Girl Alive_ straddles the two as it goes about setting up a dark thriller plot, gravitating mostly towards depicting the former but not wholly avoiding brushes with the latter. The film’s screenplay is drafted by Jessica Knoll from her bestselling novel of the same name, built around teen gangrape and bullying, and gun violence in schools. The restructured storytelling for screen plays out a lot of those disturbing aspects but not without getting into unsavoury detailing, especially in sequences where the drama goes into brutal teenage flashbacks.

With novelist Knoll involved in screenwriting, you would expect the film’s script to be its high point. It isn’t, if only because some of the essential sensitivity is lost in translation from book to screen. A film of this genre would be expected to have a crisp narrative while unfolding the suspense and driving home the deeper context of its story. Knoll’s screenplay and Mike Barker’s directorial treatment hit predictable mode soon enough, and you figure out the mystery as well as the message long before they unravel. The film has its reflective moments focussed on teen trauma but these end up in borderline sensationalism, and as mere formality meant to highlight the impact of such an ordeal on the victim’s adulthood.

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In a way, Knoll’s endeavour reminds one of Gone Girl, which was screenplayed by author Gillian Flynn from her novel of the same name and which, too, was crafted to unfold as a psychological suspense drama centred on a female protagonist. If Rosamund Pike took Gone Girl to cult heights with her chillingly understated act, you cannot fault Mila Kunis in any way.She brings alive her central role of Ani FaNelli in Luckiest Girl Alive with conviction. Somewhere, though, you sense that Knoll and Kunis’s efforts missed the golden touch of Gone Girl director David Fincher.

Kunis’ Ani FaNelli is a New Yorker with “the edge”, flawlessness embodied. Knoll draws from her real-life stint as a former editor of Cosmopolitan to imagine Ani as a senior editor at a fashion glossy called The Women’s Bible. She has a great love life (Finn Wittrock plays boyfriend Luke Harrison the fourth) and is gearing up for a lavish wedding. Ani’s picture perfect world, however, is in for a rude jolt when a crime documentary filmmaker approaches her. He is out to make a film on a shocking incident that took place in the posh private high school that Ani attended as a teenager, which brings back memories of a chain of horrifying incidents. Ani realises if what happened in school when she was 14 comes out in the open now, it would shatter the veneer of her picture-perfect life.

As the narrative oscillates between Ani’s past and present, secrets unravel. We discover the darker side to her persona. The constantly shifting of the story between present day and flashback helps build curiosity up to a point, about what exactly happened in high school all those years ago. Knoll’s screenwriting does not depart much from her novel while gradually revealing how the past has taken a psychological toll on Ani, as she silently struggles beneath her exterior of happiness to come to terms with the sordid chapter of her life.

The screenplay uses the tragic school incident as a basis to zero in on everything that happens in the film. There’s focus on gun violence in American schools and on how ruthless peer pressure during the teenage years leaves a scar. Ani’s resolve to paint a cosmetic picture of harmony comes under scanner, too. Knoll also incorporates a bunch of characters including Ani’s mother Dina (Connie Britton) and boss Lolo (Jennifer Beals), each with their little tales to highlight various other aspects of life. It becomes obvious soon enough that a film, with a limited runtime of below two hours and unlike a more expansive medium as a novel, is inadequate to accommodate so many subtexts amidst the suspense drama. As the screenplay struggles to balance the twists with the film’s attempts at imparting comment, Knoll’s writing fails to do justice to both.

The makers on their part seem obsessed to maintain a likeness with the novel, so much so director Mike Barker choses to retain the book’s first-person narration style in the film. Kunis as Ani is constantly in voiceover mode, in order to reveal everything from her obvious trust issues to her habit of indulging in the occasional white lie. Soliloquies work fine for a novel when it comes to securing an emotional bond between characters and the reader. In the case of a film, unless written with engaging dialogues, they tend to impede the narrative flow.

The storytelling, though, is interesting in the way it lets Ani play the field. This would be among the strongest roles to come Mila Kunis’ way, with Barker meticulously blending the character’s reality with imaginary sequences meant to capture her thought process. Technically, the director utilises the film’s cinematography (Colin Watkinson) and editing (Nancy Richardson) well in order to achieve interesting shots. Scenes of a campus shooting, for instance, are captured on camera from the angle of the attacker as well as victim, rendering the desired unsettling emotional impact for both. The director, however, is far less creative when it comes to unfolding the thriller quotient of the story. The film underwhelms with the way it leads up to its closure.

Without giving away spoilers, if the film’s half-baked finale reduces Ani to a mere plastic symbol of all that the story represents, the fact is ironic because Mila Kunis strives to rise above the script material at hand. Beyond Kunis, Barker’s supporting cast is toplined by Chiara Aurelia who does admirably as the teenaged Ani, considering some of the most cruel, most demanding scenes have been filmed on her. Connie Britton as Ani’s mother and Scoot McNairy as Ani’s former teacher Mr. Larson add screen presence to roles that merited better writing. It’s a cast that redeems a film which starts off on an ambitious high but ends in a mire of mediocrity.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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