In 'Ingrid Goes West', Aubrey Plaza plays a social media stalker. It's unnervingly relatable.
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Until recently, Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen didn’t have Instagram accounts.
But in making the dark comedy “Ingrid Goes West,” about a social media stalker and her latest obsession, the stars dived right into the world of Instagram influencers, filters and perfectly arranged photos.
“I had a phone in my hand probably every second the whole time we were filming,” Plaza, who plays Ingrid Thorburn, said in an interview. “When we weren’t shooting, but I was on set, I was kind of allowing myself to get lost in looking at other people’s feeds and kind of spiraling into it — which I wouldn’t let myself do in my real life because I have self-control.”
Unlike Plaza, Ingrid lacks all social media self-control. She even moves to California to befriend an Instagram influencer she spotted in a magazine: Taylor Sloane, played by Olsen, who gets paid for breezy-chic curated shots of products she posts. Their ensuing friendship shows the blurred lines between reality and fiction, and the disastrous consequences of getting lost in between the two.
The instant euphoria that Ingrid experiences from likes, the way she scrolls through the app during every waking moment (brushing her teeth, on the toilet) and how she falls asleep with her phone in her hand may seem extreme. But in “Ingrid Goes West,” out in Washington theaters Friday, her relationship with her phone has an unsettling familiar quality. Who among us hasn’t found ourselves going deep down an Instagram rabbit hole, only to emerge an hour later on the profile of a yoga instructor in New Zealand with a penchant for beautiful avocado toast pics?
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