British influencer\/singer\/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer\/singer\/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of herself, in this quease-inducing thriller exercise. The ick gets generated not necessarily by the eventual gore that erupts in the last reel, but by the tacky weirdness of the way the film apes the mannerisms of social media reels and streaming nonsense to both satirise the ugly side of the business but also exploit and profit off it at the same time. On one level, it\u2019s an eerily clever exercise in bad faith, like a poor Michael Haneke film (think Funny Games) for gen-Z kicks; on another, maybe it\u2019s just a crappy ripoff of online tropes that have been way overexposed already. Or both.<\/p>\n
Anyway, here\u2019s what happens: influencer Chiara gets invited to visit Copenhagen by a tourist organisation, a deal set up by her avaricious manager Alice (Jazmine Summer). Of course, this means practically every moment of her time awake in the city will be filmed, both by Chiara herself on her trusty smartphone, or a camera crew led by director Mike (played by Mike Nybroe, who is also director of The Influencer Project, ha ha); Mike is supported by sound man Daniel (Daniel Parmo) and cameraman Victor (Luca Storm). The early sections turn in all the influence-slop you would expect, with shopping trips to trendy merch vendors such as Baum und Pferdgarten, and meals at fancy local restaurants, and then a livestreamed visit to a \u201chaunted house,\u201d which is the big thing on Instagram and TikTok these days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But the product placement is somewhat interrupted by moments of real fear (or \u201creal fear\u201d) when Chiara starts getting threatening direct messages (from someone calling themselves KingSlayer) who wants her to stop talking for reasons not clearly explained at first, otherwise he will kill and rape her, not necessarily in that order. This unsurprisingly creates a pall over Chiara\u2019s trip, but if she just quits and goes home she\u2019ll miss out on $100k in deals, so that\u2019s not an option.<\/p>\n
So are we supposed to despise Chiara for her greed or applaud her girl-boss fortitude in not being intimidated by a stalker? And what to make of the film\u2019s claims that this was partly inspired by real incidents of stalking? Nybroe and co work the debate into the endless stream of comments we see scrolling alongside Chiara\u2019s livestream \u2013 a river of chat that doesn\u2019t let up even when the credits start to roll, ersatz dialectics for an age of digital proliferation.<\/p>\n
The Influencer Project is in UK and Irish cinemas from 16 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British influencer\/singer\/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer\/singer\/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":925548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-925547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}