Chelsea Lupkin
To scrap for self-worth via the social currency of “likes” in a world dominated by online personalities is the kind of Black Mirror universe we’ve all somehow fallen into and have strangely accepted. The pressure among young women to be an “it girl” is propagating an unobtainable need for perfection that no amount of hacks or beauty filters can provide, nor comments or fire emojis can assuage. Lael Roger’s The Influencer satirizes this battleground of competition as a group of young women seek to achieve the apotheosis of cool girl status, producing a smart and unworldly short film that is as genre-bending as it is disturbing.
Spend an evening with the film’s hot and flirty girl squad as they embark on their perfect day. What you encounter is noxious, yet also provocative. Performances by Bria Condon, Laura Hetherington, Mackenzie Wynn, and Deisy Patiño are believably poisonous and fueled by an insatiable need that is compelling to watch. While Rogers doesn’t want you to like these people, she does want you to worship them. “So many of our interactions with technology, while they may feel self-governed, are deeply engineered and puppeteered by invisible strings. Manipulations by algorithms, marketing, AI, and bots take advantage of our evolutionary desires for love and community and clutter our attempts at connection. The insidious part is so much of this happens beneath the surface. We don’t even feel the jockeying for control, power, and influence,” Rogers explains.
The film’s cool-girl squad. Rogers and team mix orientations and technologies to match the flat, digital aesthetics of their characters’ social media world.
Yet Rogers has more than a social critique on her mind, and the theme of worship is taken to an incredible extreme as Rogers explores the true meaning of a cult following. The Influencer spins horror from our obsessive online personas and desires for popularity, taking the story in wild directions. While you want to laugh at the absurdity of the plot, even the characters come to realize just how dark their world has become—harvesting the eyes and minds of their followers might actually mean literal eyeballs…
“Early on, we decided to tell this story through a mix of media formats, particularly found footage.”
As befits a film about social media and its deleterious effects, the tools of the medium are employed in the storytelling—quite a bit of this film was shot on cell phones to emulate the digital hellscape of its characters disguised in party culture and dazzling smiles. Rogers intermixes vertical shots hypnotically and the mish-mash of approaches is expertly edited into an intoxicating whole that you both want to escape and embrace. “Early on, we decided to tell this story through a mix of media formats, particularly found footage. We also made the decision to shoot on real phones instead of shooting on a cinema camera and then altering the footage to “look” like phones. Phones have such a specific, loose quality and we wanted that kinetic freedom to come through in the edit,” Rogers explains. Rogers then gave the actors some creative freedom, allowing them to step into the role of camera operator, choreographing the camera angles in tandem with her Director of Photography Jonathan Houser. “While we had shot lists, they weren’t conventional and throughout the shoot, we developed our own visual language to cover scenes and build dramatic tension through what existed in the frame, and more importantly what existed outside of it.”
Filming therefore created several unconventional challenges in the edit, but with the help of Short of the Week alums, producers Megan Leonard, David Bradburn, and Zeus Kontoyannis Rogers were able to construct the influencing world. Being an extremely music-forward film, Rogers also collaborated with the musical artist Leeni, who wrote and produced the original soundtrack for the film with songs are deliciously transparent in driving home their point, with lyrics like, “I want to be a god.”
Ironically, researching influencer culture for this film embedded Rogers deeper into social media than she ever intended. Despite appreciating her newfound skill in executing a perfect winged eyeliner, she is now divesting herself from many platforms (but hopefully not before she promotes this online release!). We’re pleased to help present the film’s online premiere after a stellar festival run that saw the short as an official selection at many of the top North American genre festivals including Fantasia International Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Beyond Fest, as well as Overlook Film Festival. Rogers is currently developing and writing two feature projects. The first is a horrific take on the dog movie genre and the second a northern revenge western set in her hometown of Juneau, Alaska. Twisted and incredibly stylish, The Influencer is a small taste of what Rogers is capable of, a talent and POV that we expect will lead to an exciting career in filmmaking.