The Influencer Project

Chiara King is one of those social media influencers that, thanks to her skilful agent "Alice" (Jazmine Summer), is starting to cash in on her almost 1½ million followers. Her latest opportunity for lucrative self-publicity comes courtesy of the Copenhagen Tourist Board who seem to have $50k to burn by inviting her to wander the streets of their fair city enthusiastically a-posting as she goes. There is also going to be a film crew following her every move for a week so we can have a documentary too. Barely has she swallowed her first pickled herring than she starts to get threatening messages on her Insta. Basically, go home or else she is going to be brutally targeted. Now at this point what might you do? Call the police? Report this account to the App? Or perhaps when someone is banging on your hotel room door in the middle of the night. Would you turn on all the lights and call hotel security? Well no, not our Chiara. She decides that she and her brave army of distant couch-bound friends are going to try and "out" this person - using only a masked photo as their clue. What now ensues is frankly the stuff of a student project that relies far too heavily on the contents of her mobile phone screen. I don't know about you, but a tiny screen pointed at a camera that is relaying (some) of her messages to a bigger cinema screen a dozen or so rows away from my seat just left me squinting, but little better informed. Now that may have made what purported to be her terror a little more authentic for her and her filming buddies, but for the rest of us it's a technique that simply didn't work. It's as if the video had been completed on a laptop computer screen and then upconverted for one much bigger without anyone bothering to ensure that we could actually see/read what we needed to become or stay interested. By the time we do reach the conclusion, there is a semblance of a point about the increasing toxicity of life on the web for the innocent users as well as the fame/adulation/validation hunters and we are given a glimpse into a digital world inhabited by the trolls and others for whom there are no boundaries, but by that point I was rather bored with her constant vacillations between fear and fashion and I was praying that this particular fly on the wall got splatted. Anyone with half a brain will already know that the web is aptly named - and not just for it's connectivity, either - but I couldn't help leaving after this thinking of that old internet adage about never letting talent get in the way of making a good living. Quite why this got a cinena release at all is anyone's guess, but if I were you I just wouldn't bother - and next time you are in a boutique you ought to ask to see their marketing budgets before you pay through the nose.