San Francisco Independent Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

SARAH PIROZEK: #LIKE (2018)


SARAH RICH IN #LIKE

Teen vendetta

The peaceful upstate New York town of Woodstock in the summertime is the setting for #LIKE, a film that follows a teenage girl called Rosie, mourning the first anniversary of her younger sister Amelia's death. Rosie discovers that the mysterious man who may have sexploited and bullied her sister into committing suicide is back online trolling for new victims. After the local police refuse to help, she takes matters into her own hands. Her vindictive anger leads her to discover, as the blurb puts it, "a darker side she never knew she had as she takes justice into her own hands."

Writer-director Sarah Pirozek declared on her Kickstarter page that she had "decided to make an unapologetically kickass feminist film." Working as a successful editor of TV commercials, Pirozek says she sought to create "powerful and positive images of women instead of the caricatures that populated the screens." She encountered a study showing that "84% of the directors working on TV shows were white men." So she decided "to make a commercial, genre, micro-budget thriller, with a nuanced female lead, telling an important story." "The film stars Marc Menchaca ('Ozark'/'Homeland'/'She's Lost Control')" she writes, "and introduces a stunning new talent, Sarah Rich, both of whom gave performances of a lifetime."

Pirozek believes herself to have made a feminist film - elsewhere called a "noir feminist thriller" - but #LIKE reads more like a creepy revenge flick - one that moves at a snails's pace. It may qualify for some oddball midnight genre venues, but it's hardly what you'd call "commercial." Maybe feminism in its more guerrilla motivational moments does call for depiction of one-on-one revenge against men who have offended against womanhood. But two wrongs do not make a right. In realistic terms the "heroine" is simply guilty of a crime - kidnapping and tormenting a man.

Rosie seems first misguided, then sick, and can't awaken our admiration for long. Sympathy, perhaps; but her victim evokes that feeling in equal measure: an unintended consequence of the plot is to awaken pity for the presumed malefactor. One reason for this is that his online bullying is an action hard to dramatize at best, and here it's never actually depicted. This is one of the major lacunae in the flimsy screenplay. Contrast Aneesh Chaganty's skillful plotting for last year's cyber investigation movie Searching, starring John Cho. Rosie might just as well have kidnapped some random dude off the tree lined streets.

Acknowledged as micro-budget, the film makes good, economical use of available locations and people around Woodstock, New York, where it's set, but the key scenes take place in a basement. This is where Rosie (Rich) holds a man (Menchaca) prisoner for an unspecified length of time under implausible circumstances. He may be guilty of cyber-bullying (or taunting or provoking? it's somewhat unclear) a young teen girl, Rosie's sister, who apparently committed suicide. AT least Rosie believes this. But she broaches it with the man in curiously roundabout fashion.

Rosie's action is sadistic and strange. It's difficult to understand what Pirozek is getting at. The movie is best as an expression of a young girl's rage. This seems an angry misandrist offshoot of the #MeToo movement, a negative one that may not win many new supporters. Does advocacy of the rights of women require hatred of men?

#LIKE, 90 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2019 SF Indiefest (30 Jan.-14 Feb. 2019). This appears to be the film's premiere.