Butler's Cinema Scene

Elizabeth Olsen, Aubrey Plaza

“INGRID GOES WEST” My rating: B

87 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Nobody does nuts like Aubrey Plaza.

Oh, she can play “normal” if required (TV’s Parks and Recreation”), but she really shines when the lets her crazy flag fly, as exemplified by her mental inmate in TV’s “Legion,” her suburban zombie in “Life After Beth” and her scary Medieval nun in the recent “The Hours.”

So Plaza is right at home in “Ingrid Goes West,” writer/director Matt Spicer’s very black comedy about an unhinged celebrity stalker.

As the film begins our heroine crashes a wedding and sprays Mace in the bride’s face.  (We later learn that the two women are strangers, but that Ingrid has been following the nuptial preparations on Instagram and is incensed at not being invited.)

When next we see Ingrid she’s being discharged from a mental facility. Shortly thereafter her mother dies, leaving Ingrid with $60,000.  She decides to relocate to Los Angeles so that she can be closer to a woman she has been obsessing over via social media.

Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen) is a perky, self-centered cutie who has become a celeb by displaying so much of her life on the Internet.  Like a Kardashian, she’s famous mostly for being famous. She has no discernible talents (she might find a gig as a personal shopper, though everything she bought would reflect her tastes rather than those of a client).

Aubrey Plaza

Taylor never misses an opportunity for a selfie or to promote her romance with the publicity-shy Ezra (Wyatt Russell). She posts endless pictures of herself with her dog.  Every new clothing purchase means a fashion layout with Taylor as the star.

Ingrid wants to be Taylor so bad it hurts.  To get close to her object of desire, she kidnaps Taylor’s dog, then returns it, saying she found it wandering the street.

This Good Samaritan act has the desired effect. Soon she and Taylor are best buds, shopping together, traveling together, sharing intimate secrets.

Well, Taylor does. Ingrid makes up a fake past and an imaginary boyfriend. When asked to produce this beau, she cons her landlord (O’Shea Jackson) into taking the role, then bristles when Taylor and Ezra take to him like ducks to water.

The screenplay by David Branson Smith and Spicer walks a queasy line between social satire and borderline horror. The film savagely ridicules our current trend toward suffocating self-absorption. At the same time Plaza’s Ingrid is skin-crawlingly creepy.

There’s more than a little “Single White Female” vibe here, and although the movie never veers into outright physical horror, it’s uncomfortable enough that many viewers will find themselves squirming over Ingrid’s creative/desperate lies and the potential fallout that will follow the inevitable big breakup with Taylor.

It’s surprising how well “Ingrid Goes West” works, given that the lead female characters are, to one degree or another, seriously off-putting personalities. Compared to them Russell’s Ezra seems a tower of normalcy.

Nor do the filmmakers try to sugarcoat the situation, or offer some sort of cure for Ingrid’s mania. This, they seem to be telling us, is the new normal. Get used to it.

| Robert W. Butler