Luckiest Girl Alive
Director: Mike Barker
Year Released: 2022
Rating: 1.0
"Journalist" Ani Fanelli (Mila Kunis as an adult, Chiara Aurelia as a teenager) thinks she has her life on track - her clickbait articles are popular and she's preparing to marry long-time boyfriend Luke (Finn Wittrock) - but when a documentarian shows up and wants to record her discussing a school shooting she survived years prior, it brings back memories of how she was sexually assaulted by three of her classmates and only one person believed her (and he was fired for it). It's another story involving "female victimhood" that somehow eluded the producers at the Lifetime Network, morbidly joining together a Columbine-type massacre and the hit Netflix show 13 Reasons Why - lingering trauma from her past interferes with her current relationship, as she frequently fantasizes about stabbing Luke, binge eats and apparently can't have "normal sex." Kunis is fine in the lead and she tries to make Ani's internal anguish feel "real," but the movie (adapted by Jessica Knoll from her novel) really enjoys wallowing in its own misery. Incidentally, Jennifer Beals' head editor Lolo offers a very good piece of advice for would-be scribes: write like no one's going to read it.