Film Review - Millie Lies Low
Images courtesy of Rialto Distribution.
We’ve all been there; stress, anxiety, depression, it happens. Fear of flying - that feels totally standard. Realising you’ve committed to documenting a trip to New York on social media as a component of an architectural internship scholarship and trying to work out how to do so without actually leaving the country because you had a panic attack that forced you off of your flight to New York, and experiencing such intense social pressure to follow through with said social media documentation that you pretend to be overseas whilst you are in fact hiding from your friends and family in your hometown? If I had a dollar for the number of times….
In a fresh show of young talent found close to home, Auckland-local Michelle Savill’s new feature Millie Lies Low sees Ana Scotney playing the all-too-relatable titular millennial who finds herself thoroughly tangled in a lie used to cover up a truth she is desperately trying to deny. Having missed a crucial flight to attend her international internship, she comes up with a Not Okay (dir. Quinn Sheppard, 2022)-esque plan of pretending to be in The Big Apple, whilst actually laying low in her hometown and avoiding everyone she knows, as she tries to scrape up the cash to buy a replacement flight ticket.
Millie’s dilemma speaks to a multitude of millennial frustrations: mental health problems, financial difficulties, loneliness, performance anxiety, imposter syndrome, lack of professional creativity, a reluctance to seek help, the impact of peer-pressure, and having weird sexual interactions with men that are way too old for you. Her experience is genuinely relatable, and blackly comic - it’s not one to watch and think “I’m so glad that’s not me”, but “Oh man, I’m glad that hasn’t happened to me in a while”.
In more specific moments of authentic relatability, she spends time typing and retyping instagram post captions, editing her own digital tone and counting the perfect number of exclamation marks for the fake, edited photos she is posting (three should do it - just enough to look enthusiastic, but also not too many, so people know you’re being esoteric, and it’s a bit sarcastic too - you don’t want to sound so serious that you scare off the potential likes from the people you met in a club bathroom last weekend). She hides in what appears to be the literal wilderness, whilst downloading and reposting someone else’s photos of NYC, editing herself into them. She uses sand as simulation snow and posts a boomerang of herself creating an angel on the dirty road in New Zealand, then smiles at her phone in the dark as she proudly watches the like count of the post go up. It’s an obvious depiction of the way we each perform on social media, but it’s nonetheless effective at critiquing the careful way we curate and tend our online selves to put out the exact vibe we wish to convey.
Millies Lies Low is an effective tragicomic story of the way we create truth to find our own, as well as the lengths we will go to and things we will have to lose to get to it. With the millennial female comedy sense of Broad City, Easy A, and even a hint of The Devil Wears Prada, this dramedy is a must-see for any millennial who’s not quite sure what’s going on right now and is trying to figure out how to feel ok about it.
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Millie Lies Low is screening in select cinemas from Thursday 17th November. For tickets and more info, click here.