The Girl from Plainville is a creepy tale about the lives of teenagers

In a scene from the third episode of LionsgatePlay’s The Girl from Plainville , Conrad played by Colton Ryan prepares to go attend a high school party. He stands, bare-chested in front of the mirror and attempts to mime an African American disposition assisted by some key slangs. “Pop Culture, Pop Culture, Current Events, Knowledge” he says, meaningfully into the mirror has he slaps himself into some sort of rhythmic identity. It’s a fascinating scene that underlines the psychological pressure teenagers live with in a world full of larger-than-life identities like those on the internet. It’s telling really that Conrad never quite uses the world social media, but hard earned keywords that might allude to a more refined setting of the young mind. Everyone here is just trying to be someone else, the scene tells us. The Girl from Plainville , though it drifts through the middle, is creepy in a good way. Based on the real life story of Michelle Carter who was charged with the involuntarily abetting the suicide of her then boyfriend Conrad, in 2014, the series is based on a story that is already too brief as a logline to be stretched over 8 plodding episodes. Carter is played with unsettling authority by the brilliant Elle Fanning. Fanning embodies Carter’s vagueness but distinct charms that brought the two youngsters together. The show plays out along two timelines, one where the case is being investigated (the weaker of the two) and the other where Conrad and Carter explore their somewhat undeclared relationship. The biggest challenge the narrative was always going to undertake was to fill in the bits where the two text each other. Carter’s conviction was based on thousands of messages exchanged between the two, and the show is at pains to delineate for the sake of the viewer the importance of the few times the two met. The series does an admirable job of painting their personal lives, especially Conrad’s isolation amidst a culture of alpha males, an overbearing father and a household that naturally expects adolescence from the somewhat restricted. Any inquest into the quest was always going to be about the why and how of it which makes the investigation bits feel like needless tissue. Skin it clean and you’d probably have a perfectly capable storyline that fits within six episodes of say 30-minutes each, maybe even a feature length film. But because the series must last eight overindulgent episodes we digress into seminal lessons about teenage lives, the inner workings of sprightly but gullible youngsters and much more. It’s Euphoria, but without the style or the same class of storytelling. There is nothing wrong with wanting to comment upon the existential crisis Gen-Z must deal with in the vaguely brutal world of social media, but in trying to do everything the show often veers off-track. There is no doubt that Carter is the peg of this story, and even though Fanning delivers a convincing performance, there are too many tangential threads here that mess up a solid looking yarn. In one scene Carter awkwardly discusses dating with Conrad’s sister in a pool. “They tell us to hide from men. But women are way worse” the sister says to which Carter reacts unconvincingly. It’s one of those scenes that you know are trying to be prophetic but is also force-fitted into a show that should just be about the mystery of what exactly happened between the two, and precisely what state of mind were those text messages exchanged in. To which effect you cannot help but think this might have also been better off as a documentary. It’s easier said than done, to get that kind of access to the victims and the convicted, but somehow the real Michelle Carter must ultimately be the face and voice of a character that is so mysteriously plain it’s hard to imagine what makes her weep and what makes her laugh. There is a kookiness to Carter’s uneven ways and it is exhibited through some stunningly acted pauses where Fanning ably holds the camera’s attention on her own. Fanning who also played the bloodthirsty opportunist in Nicholas Winding Refn’s bizarrely affecting The Neon Demon is not new to roles that are hard to define as difficult as they are to ignore. In a series that tries to pack in an unnecessary amount of bulk to a story that would have perhaps been served best by being told the lean way, Fanning and Ryan both shine as the beating, poignant and ultimately undefinable hearts of the series. If not for anything else you can watch the series for these two performances. Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.