Unlike some other reviewers here, I did not at any point sense that the filmmakers were trying to get me to root for the main character, nor did I think she "suddenly" turned evil. She seemed rather unscrupulous from the first moment she appeared on the screen.
I guess that indicates decent acting from Bel Powley, and I do like her quite a bit in general and would say she's the strongest part of this film. Tracee Ellis Ross, not so much. One gets the sense she watched The Devil Wears Prada one too many times and essentially traced over Streep's Miranda Priestly to create her character. Unlike Streep's, however, her performance was WAY too "affected" to feel believable. The other acting was overall serviceable but not good, and sometimes even bad.
The most disappointing thing, however, is how unrealistic the plot is. They want you to take this journey of twists and turns, but this kind of thing just would never happen outside grade school. Without giving up spoilers, let's just say, for example, that if you submitted to a news station a recording of someone's voice that contains serious, career-ending allegations, the burden of proof would be on you to substantiate that the raw, unedited footage matched the final version. Any real journalist would not just accept an mp3 as being accurate and uncut -- in fact, in today's world they'd have someone closely listening into it to detect any flaws that indicated it had been manipulated or even generated by AI.
That's not to say you couldn't fake an audio recording and post it to social media, and destroy someone's career just by the lie going around fast enough to do the job before fact-checkers corrected things. So, since this movie was released in 2023, the filmmakers should have made the necessary tweaks so that the plot (which COULD have actually been pretty good) was believable.
Powley's character also didn't quite match up to that of a journalism STUDENT. She acted like she was at a stage of her career where she could just skip straight to the top and have a career-defining story... when her career hadn't even actually BEGUN. This was a bridge too far for the viewer to accept. I get that her character is rather unhinged, but couldn't we at least have her be a LITTLE bit in touch with reality? Either that or just make her completely bonkers... but they didn't do that. They had her both ambitious and smart, and completely unaware of how her industry (or any career?) works. Just another example of lack of realism.
It also takes almost half the film for the plot to begin to take off. I was bored and pausing to read synopses, to see whether I wanted to continue to watch. It does pick up the pace a little after the halfway point, but it needn't have put us through all the slow, plodding scenes up to that point, which didn't ultimately service the plot anyway. The relationship between Tremblay's and Powley's characters was developed to no real end, for instance, in terms of what they or the viewer might learn about themselves.
I would love to have seen this story done with more realism in both plot and acting -- and also, there was a perfect opportunity to add a REALLY sinister twist (they could have revealed a very deep, dark secret about the main character's past, or at least hinted at it heavily) that would have made it much more memorable. They then should have given the story some kind of satisfying "moral" for lack of a better word. Even if it was a negative one. Instead they almost tried to make it (again) Devil Wears Prada-esque, but in this they failed because so many other components of that very good film were missing here.
Despite all this, it was watchable. For a one-time viewing at least. Just keep your expectations low!
