'Luckiest Girl Alive' (2022) Film Review
Mila Kunis leads Netflix’s fantastic ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ with the poise and the right amount of mistrust needed for such a tempting and intriguing leading lady. As the film begins, and remembering Kunis’ fateful ‘American Psycho 2’ role, one had neglected to read any synopsis of the latest Netflix feature and thought this film to be a new attempt at the unlikeable woman, a female sigma or perhaps an un-complex manipulative narrator narrative.
What a shock and what tears followed after the first act. ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ is an amazing perspective and insight into how women can never win. We are forced to hide our secrets and fears but now in the presence of #metoo we are ultimately forced to now proclaim our trauma and be role models for “all the women out there”.
Why do all the women matter when one woman will have the trauma and pain of not just her but all the women on her shoulders?
The film delicately explores the intricacies of trauma throughout its script, dry humour at times, it’s visual effects. As someone with PTSD, it perfectly exemplifies how it feels to live your life still fighting against yourself and your body to not react and exist within that moment.
Personally, I feel seen, truly and really seen. It was carefully and thoughtfully done so.
The motif of Kunis’ journalism and documentary retelling of her story, how she does not fully tell the truth is perfectly thought out. It’s understandable and in fact, exemplifies what we go through. We want to protect the lives we create for ourself, we do not wish to villainies the ones we love but we are so angry that we were not protected.
The truth is so hard and complex to admit to yourself and understand it and live within it, let alone live in something new or different also. To live knowing your pain and truth with the people who caused it or didn’t do enough not to, that’s a hard thing to move on from in a relationship and can it really be done? There will always be anger and resentment, even if it can be put aside most of the time.
There isn’t a happy, we’ve fixed the world ending, 5th avenue bitch a cold stark reminder that no matter how many times feminism may evolve, or how widely spread me too can soar, there is no perfect fix or solution. Women are against women, for men maybe, for their ignorance perhaps, some feminists may say a deeply patriarchal self-hatred for being women, Freudian theorists may blame our ‘Lack’. It’s refreshing to see the honest backlash women get for sharing their stories, 5th avenue butch was certainly rude and perhaps fuelled by her own agenda obviously, but was consistent with the reality of victims sharing their stories for their “fifteen minutes”.
It’s complex, it’s not clean, it’s mushy and grey and so tightly woven, this idea of demolishing the structures of rape culture with a woman speaking up, it’s not realistic but I think or I would like to think that it helps.
This new era of the rape revenge film, Promising Young Woman (2020), Fresh (2022) and now Luckiest Girl Alive, takes that bittersweet, mindful, understandable approach to narratives of women coming out on top, the final girl defeating the foe, that is far beyond the end credits of a movie.
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