(For the past three weeks, Lisa Marie has been in the process of reviewing 56 back to school films! She’s promised the rest of the TSL staff that this project will finally wrap up by the end of Monday, so that she can devote her time to helping to prepare the site for its annual October horror month! Will she make it or will she fail, lose her administrator privileges, and end up writing listicles for Buzzfeed? Keep reading the site to find out!)
I almost hate the idea of criticizing a film like 2015’s A Girl Like Her. This is one of those films that is about a serious subject and it has a great message but the execution just doesn’t work.
A Girl Like Her takes place at an affluent public high school. Everyone at the school is really excited because their school has been named the 10th best school in America and it was literally the only public school to make the list! A documentary crew shows up to shoot a film about the school but, shortly after arriving, they learn that a student named Jessica (Lexi Ainsworth) has just tried to commit suicide. What could have driven the shy but generally well-liked Jessica to swallow a handful of pills!? Don’t worry, Inspector Documentarian is on the case!
The film’s director, Amy S. Weber, plays the director of the fictional documentary. And yes, this is a mockumentary, with everything that suggests. In fact, it’s such a mockumentary that it starts to get annoying. There’s only so many random rack focus shots you can see before you want to scream, “Okay, it’s found footage! I FREAKING GET IT ALREADY!” And then there’s the fact that the camera never stops moving. Weber definitely goes overboard with the whole jerky, hand-held camera thing. The shaky cam didn’t make me physically ill (like Hardcore Henry did) but still, it was all a bit much. I’ve seen enough documentaries to know that occasionally, a camera can be held still.
Anyway, Weber finds out that Jessica’s best friend was Brian (Jimmy Bennett) and Brian reveals that he’s obsessed with filming everything. He knew that Jessica was being bullied so he gave her a hidden camera so that she could record her daily torment. Watching the footage reveals that Jessica was being viciously bullied by Avery (Hunter King), who is one of the most popular girls in school.
When Amy first approaches Avery, it provides a moment of unintentional humor. Weber apparently went to a lot of effort to make the high school and its students come across as being authentic. Let’s just say that a lot of the film’s interviews are conducted with teenagers who are awkward in a very recognizable and believable way. But then the documentary crew goes to Avery’s locker and there’s Avery, wearing an expensive pink dress and looking and sounding totally and complete like an actress and the film’s authenticity just collapses. She might as well just turn to the camera and say, “Hi, I’m the meanest mean girl of all.”
Amy convinces Avery to take a camera and to document her own life. So, to keep track, this film is now made up of Jessica’s footage, Brian’s footage, the documentary crew’s footage, and Avery’s video blog. That’s a lot of found footage to sit through and, unfortunately, very little of it feels authentic. The film is actually probably as its strongest when it focuses on Avery, who has a terrible home life and turns out to be a surprisingly multi-faceted bully. (For the most part, Hunter King gives the film’s best performance.) Jessica remains a cipher, even in the footage that she filmed. Meanwhile, the documentary crew’s footage gave off a definite “worst PBS special ever” vibe.
Don’t get me wrong. Weber’s heart was in the right place but, as with most anti-bullying films, A Girl Like Her is often too much “on the nose” for its own good. For all the effort that was put into making this a convincing mockumentary, the illusion is pretty much destroyed whenever anyone opens their mouth and delivers dialogue that could have come straight from Season 12 of Degrassi.
It would be nice if a movie could end bullying but A Girl Like Her is not the film to do it.