Luckiest Girl Alive

It’s been more than two decades since the deadly Columbine high school shooting that shook the world. While these traumatic events continue to happen to the point of ubiquity and a whole generation of kids have grown up in their wake, Hollywood has found in them a new setting for films that deal with lingering high school trauma. It seems for every compassionate, nuanced film like “The Fallout,” there’s something exploitative like “The Desperate Hour

Unfortunately, “Luckiest Girl Alive,” the latest of these films falls in that latter category. Based on the book of the same name by Jessica Knoll, who also serves as screenwriter, the movie not only dramatizes a school shooting in poor taste, it has the gall to use one as the backdrop while it also exploits rape trauma in the name of girl boss feminism.

With a tone ripped directly from “Gone Girl,” the film centers on the seemingly perfect life of Ani (Mila Kunis), a writer for a glossy women’s magazine named The Woman’s Bible. She’s written “1,500 stories about how to give a blow job” but all she really wants is a job at the New York Times Magazine so she can be “someone people can respect.” Ani is engaged to an old money scion named Luke (Finn Wittrock, given nothing to do), who is more of a box to check towards Ani’s goal of unquestionable social legitimacy than anything else.

Her desire to be the most uncontestable rich person stems from her high school days. A scholarship kid at an elite prep school in Philadelphia, Ani, then known as Tiff (Chiara Aurelia), is a survivor of the “deadliest private school shooting in U.S. history.” That this shooting took place in 1999 (the same year as Columbine) and the film’s revelation of who the perpetrators were is one of many incredibly tasteless decisions it makes, which is quite a distinction as the whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

Through flashbacks and Ani’s narration (which is haphazardly deployed throughout as her cynical inner thoughts, an interview for a documentary, and the copy for a piece she writes during the film’s denouement), we learn that one of the survivors, now a gun reform activist, claims that Ani was in on the shooting—but also that this same survivor was one of three classmates who gang-raped Ani at a school dance after party just weeks before the shooting. In order to win the he-said-she-said of it all, Ani aims to climb the top of the social ladder, and then share her side of the story.

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Film Credits