#RealityHigh

Hi everyone!

Leila here, and welcome to my first film review. This review happens to fit into the 'ugly' category of 'The Good, Bad, and Ugly film reviews'. This is a good thing though because we can only go up from here. And trust me, this is about as worse as it gets.

The movie '#RealityHigh' is a Netflix original that centers around Dani Barnes, a classic good girl with good grades and a bright future ahead of her. That is until she meets a guy that used to date an Instagram model and puts her life in turmoil. An interesting take on the modern teenager lifestyle.

First, I would like to acknowledge how difficult it is to portray modern ways of life such as the social media spike into cinema. Though things like Instagram modeling, vine, and viral phrases such as 'slay', 'swag, and 'lit' are normal, no audience member wants to be confronted with the reality of how cringy these things actually are. This could have been well-executed through subtle hints of the new age, but it was not. Instead, the overly saturated scenes were jam-packed with references to musically and vlogging. I think I lost 5 kilos just from cringing. It was truly a moment of self-reflection and I've never watched a vlog since.

Probably my biggest critique, however, is that there are so many avenues a movie can take, especially when employing technology, yet this movie happened to tick every cliche. I was expecting some grueling online torture like -A or gossip girl, but I was left disappointed.

Let me set the scene...
Girl has a best friend. Girl ditches best friend for more popular friends and a potential boyfriend. Doesn't fit in with new, popular friends. Old queen bee spreads rumour about the girl. Popular friends ditch girl. Girl returns to the best friend.

Sound familiar?

Nonetheless, this was not the worst. The tipping point that caused me to shut my computer out of respect for myself was this...

Popular friend: "We need to get outfits for tonight's party"

Girl: "I don't have any money"

Popular friend: "What about your dads' credit card?"

Girl: "Yeah but that's only for emergencies"

Popular friend: "Honey, this is an emergency!"

Now, I am not lying when I say I literally said the lines alongside the characters without any prior knowledge of this movie. Here is a glimpse of what I looked like watching this:

Okay, fair enough, I didn't actually finish the movie so there could have been an unexpected plot twist. But I gave it a good shot with 50 minutes and if a movie hasn't impressed me in all that time, then it definitely is not worth me trying to finish it. No matter how hard my OCD is pushing me to.  

I applaud the creators for managing to pull a 56% on rotten tomatoes. 

Summary quote:

"The shiver you feel when you watch this movie is your dignity leaving your body"