![]() Even as she stalks Taylor outright, we can practically see her loneliness, hovering around her like a vaporous aura. Ingrid’s social awkwardness is the opposite of what we want from social media, and Plaza works from that raw truth. “Can I use your bathrooooom?” she asks, with hyper-millennial exaggeration, her already wide eyes flaring just the tiniest bit, like a poker player’s almost imperceptible tell.īut what really sticks with you after watching Ingrid Goes West is Plaza’s prickly openness, her ability to scare us with Ingrid’s unhinged motives even as she draws out a fierce protectiveness in us. When she’s finally invited to dinner at Taylor’s home (after returning Taylor’s dog, which she herself had stolen earlier), she wastes little time in seeking out opportunities to snoop. Her genius physical-comedy moves inform the whole movie: After she purchases the exact same clutch bag that Taylor carries so casually, she just can’t pull off the trick of keeping it tucked chicly under her arm-it sags away from her like a half-filled flour sack, a symbol of her own sorry, unmanageable life. But the movie wouldn’t work at all without Plaza. The movie walks the balance beam between comedy and drama uneasily: Ingrid is so delusional that it’s hard to laugh at her schemes and missteps, as the material often asks us to. Plaza plays Ingrid Thorburn, a deeply unstable young woman who becomes so obsessed with an Instagram influencer, Elizabeth Olsen’s Taylor Sloane, that she moves across the country to Los Angeles to infiltrate her idol’s life. ![]() The chatter surrounding Emily the Criminal has suggested that this is her first “serious” role, but the seeds for it were planted at least five years ago, in Matt Spicer’s unruly satire Ingrid Goes West. It’s an unnervingly naked and beautiful performance, one that taps straight into the stressful tremors of everyday life, the anxieties most of us feel every day but rarely dare to acknowledge.Ĭourtesy of Roadside Attractions and Vertical EntertainmentĪs disparate as these two roles are, it’s not hard to trace their roots in Plaza’s other work. All comic performers hide to some degree behind their comedy, but here, Plaza drops the veil completely. But in Emily the Criminal, beyond the occasional line or two, Plaza’s turn isn’t funny at all. Spin Me Round is one of those comedies that keeps you guessing where it’s headed, and though Plaza’s role is small, her trademark eyeroll is key to its nutty spirit. And in the enjoyably out-there comedy Spin Me Round, directed by Jeff Baena, who also cowrote the script with the movie’s star, Alison Brie, Plaza plays the assistant of a sleazy-flirty restaurant-chain owner (Alessandro Nivola) with headquarters in a luxe villa in the Italian countryside-her job includes recruiting playmates for him. In writer-director John Patton Ford’s drama Emily the Criminal, Plaza plays a young woman who resorts to credit-card fraud to pay off her student-loan debt. But why take a star-making role when you could play a delusional stalker, a thief with the balls to hold a boxcutter to a man’s throat, a medieval nun perpetually at the end of her fuse? Plaza favors movies that don’t hand over easy answers, and whose comedy-if there’s any at all-is the uneasy kind, a mode of thinking that’s reflected in two movies hitting almost simultaneously this summer.
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