Ingrid Goes West

A lonely, mentally unstable young woman (Aubrey Plaza), fresh out of the asylum after cyber-stalking an Instagram acquaintance, takes all her money out of the bank, moves to California, and starts doing it all over again with another victim (Elizabeth Olsen). The acting is good, but this wannabe black-comedy riff on the dangers of social media (written by David Branson Smith and director Matt Spicer) misfires by breaking the first rule of comedy; the protagonist is utterly unsympathetic. Plaza is helpless to make her anything but a liar, a user, and an awful person. We know that all this isn’t going to end well, and we just want to have it over with so we can get away from this psycho. The upbeat ending rings false because (1) it feels tacked-on, and (2) the movie hasn’t shown us someone who deserves it. J.L.