MAY #8: Tragedy Girls

            

           What if Scream, but from the point-of-view of the killers? What if Heathers was on TV today? What if phones, but too much?

            Ok, I’m being a smidge mean. The premise of Tragedy Girls is actually solid. McKayla and Sadie are best friends and morbid teens with a fascination for true crime and an appetite for gore. A serial killer has taken four victims in their quiet Midwestern town. The pair of aspiring influencers create a social media presence documenting and speculating on the crimes, but their following is mediocre at best. All this happens before the movie starts. We meet the girls as they take their scheme to the next level by capturing the killer and continuing the murder spree on their own. Their modus operandi: kill everyone who ever even kinda sorta wronged them, frame the original killer, and go viral.

            As a commentary on social media, it’s kinda meh. A teacher goes on a rant about how social media makes people shallow and parasitic, which never quite transcends the “old person shakes fist at cloud” meme. The movie can never quite tell Tumblr from Twitter, and so never digs into the specificities of what makes social media toxic. As a commentary, or at least a subversion, of true crime and women’s much-discussed love for it, it’s much more interesting. The video that McKayla and Sadie make discussing the difference between a serial killer and a spree killer is funny, cute, and morbid. The movie is at its strongest when the girls are geeking out about their shared obsession, and as the Scream of true crime this could have worked really well. I wish McKayla and Sadie had a podcast or a YouTube, some specific platform to ground their endeavors, rather than an account on every social media platform promoting…what exactly? A blog? In 2017? That’s it?

PHHOOOONNNEEEESSSS

            Look, ugh, sorry, I hate being pedantic so I’m gonna take off my editor hat. A lot works about this movie. Alexandra Shipp and Brianna Hildebrand are fabulous comedic actresses. Whether it’s Shipp heavy breathing into her cellphone to lure a target-to-be or Hildebrand turning from peppy teen to frosty asshole at the drop of a pin, they carry the scene, and their chemistry is bomb. The death scenes in the first half of the film tread that magic Heathers line of morbid and absurd. The girls are bad at murder but also kind of genius, and watching them fumble their way into a successful crime scene is charming. Their dynamic with Lowell, their captured serial killer, who they see as both a mentor and a pet, is a gift, and the movie’s strongest element. I kinda wish it had taken up more screen time.

            I suspect we’ll start to see a theme in these Friday movies – two girls who feel like a synchronous pair until a boy, or a murderous urge, or both come between them. In The Lure, it was both; in Tragedy Girls, they’re on the same page with murder, but a boy fucks things up. McKayla is sure that she and Sadie are the same, but Lowell starts playing mind games, promising McKayla that Sadie will betray her. Sure enough, Sadie gets caught up with their video editor, the son of the sheriff and the world’s only forty-five year old high school student. Seriously, he was so old-looking it completely took me out of the movie. As a conflict it’s lukewarm, since this aged teenager is so unappealing, and Sadie doesn’t even seem to like him. And the weakness of this conflict kinda muddles the second half of the flick.

            And that’s a problem, because that’s when the movie tries to go from fun times at murder high to saying something, and when how little it has to say becomes apparent. At the end of the day, valorizing murder for clout feels pretty icky. It was easier to make Heathers in a pre-mass-shooting era, when teenagers weren’t killing each other on the regular. This is definitely a your mileage may vary thing, but Heathers to me feels epic, a pitch perfect depiction of teenage ennui and self-destruction that somehow manages to perfectly capture what being a teenager felt like to me, despite being made almost twenty-five years before I stepped into a high school. Part of that is quotability, part of that is impeccable plot structure, part of that is it knows when to say “oops, this murder thing was maybe a bad idea” and have its protagonist back off, while Tragedy Girls is team murder all the way to the end credits. Heathers also has a strong sense of motive and identity. In high school movies, characters are defined by their relationship to the group, but where Sadie and McKayla stand in relation to their fellow teens is never clear. They seem both like popular mean girls and broody loners. They have a clear revulsion for their classmates, but it never feels more than surface level, a last-minute gloss of motive. And I’d be happy if their motive could be as simple as “killing is fun actually,” but there’s a clarity that’s lacking. Are Sadie and McKayla killing because they hate their victims? To go viral? To make some grand social statement? Just to have a good time? Any of these are fine motives for this kind of movie, but the movie can never choose. There’s a crucial missing piece at the heart of this film that blocks it from any moral clarity or social critique. I want to feel something, some triumph or ambivalence, when Sadie and McKayla bring the film to its fiery conclusion. Instead, I just feel confused.

They are cuties tho

Vibecheck: Well-dressed in that more-is-more 2000s-y way. The needle drops and ironic musical cues in this film are some of the best comedy moments. It gets that teen movie style of heightened reality just right.

Scare Factor: This one is definitely more on the comedy side, although it goes there with the grisly kills.

Pairs Well With: My favorite part of this film is the aspiring-serial-killer meets old-timer angle, and it reminded me of Behind the Mask, a great meta-horror-comedy found footage flick that I think manages its moral quandaries a bit better. Serial Mom is also a comedy about killing people for petty reasons that lacks all moral clarity, but it’s funnier, so I don’t care.

But How Gay Is It: Sadie and McKayla have a nice habit of killing any boy who comes between them, which I appreciate. There’s a lovely bit around the climax where they all but go skipping through a field of daisies. Finally, a gay movie in this distressingly heterosexual lineup.

Girlfriend’s Corner: This movie sounds horrible and “McKayla” is somehow an even more sadistic spelling of Michaela than “Makayla.” I maybe would have enjoyed it for its baffling misunderstanding of how the internet works, but that’s about it. I am glad I decided to stare wistfully out the window and compulsively check Twitter instead of watching this movie.