Killa B (Brianna Lee) is a very successful TikTok influencer and content creator (singing, dancing, talking to the camera – you know the drill). She’s beloved of a demographic of rather dead-eyed teenagers who come to life briefly whenever she posts. All that approbation can do things to you. The Troll (2025) is about what happens when it does, in fact, do things to you.
As she scrolls through the comments on her newest video, B is taken aback by a troll who calls her manly, old and ugly – ah, the triumvirate of imagination-free online insults directed towards women. But the comment stands out: never mind the hundreds of compliments, it’s this insult which begins to nag at B’s mind. Maybe it’s just come at a bad time: although only in her late twenties, B’s agent is already gently prompting her to get some tweakments. Her audience – and more importantly, her rivals’ audiences – are very young, and they expect the same from their idols. This all triggers unpleasant memories from B’s own adolescence, a time she had gladly left behind, alongside the disparaging comments she had to listen to back then. This now feels like a precarious point in her career.
All of this conspires, perhaps, to give her an unhealthy fixation with her troll. Using various clues, and a certain amount of obsessive interest, B is able to track the young man down. His comment may have been mean, but it’s clear that, by this point, he has come to represent all of the negativity, all of the baggage which B has been carrying around whilst she’s enjoyed the benefits of her particular kind of devil’s bargain. Even so, the lengths to which B is willing to go to get her own back on this guy are surprising, especially where they threaten to encroach on her squeaky-clean persona, the one thing she can rely on in a competitive market, where to publicly err would be to lose the lot.
With a budget of just $12,000, The Troll – Brianna Lee’s first feature – is naturally curtailed in some respects and you can tell there are things it probably would have loved to do a little differently (for example, its admiring rabble of teenagers is rather small in number). It by and large returns to a rather jokey tone, which can feel like it’s wrongfooting the audience in places, and its brief runtime for a feature (just an hour) means that its detail and development are limited. It’s a snapshot. However, the short runtime is matched by a snappy editing style, which resembles the short format media used by the film’s protagonist. This is true right down to the way that the film’s moments of deeper sincerity are themselves quickly set aside, so that the film can move onto something else. It all trips along very quickly, mirroring the disconnect between B’s super-saccharine, affirmation-heavy language and her actual deeds. But where is this all going? What are B’s plans?
We get there – but, honestly, in this film, the journey is more intriguing than the destination. The Troll boasts an interesting shift of roles and perspectives. Often, and particularly in horror or genre cinema, it’s the commenter – the watcher, the lurker – who is the dangerous force, absorbing all of the information which the influencer happily puts out there for public consumption, and then using it for nefarious reasons. Here, unusually, it’s the influencer, used to a position of relative power but still reliant on praise and attention, who kickstarts the film’s main plot simply by reacting to a comment. That comment acts as a catalyst, triggering something else entirely.
It’s appropriate that the film spends a few moments moonlighting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: addictive behaviours aside (as far as we can set them aside, because the online world more than fosters its share), the Serenity Prayer which forms the bedrock of every AA meeting asks for some of that serenity “to accept the things I cannot change”. The Troll – via B – doesn’t really abide by that. Nor does it really offer a strong moral or moral arc; it more sort of *gestures at everything* and has some fun playing with the expectations and ideals which underpin social media horror, and social media more broadly. Which, all things considered, is an entirely fitting take.
The Troll (2025) receives its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on Saturday, June 20th and then screens again on Wednesday, June 24th. For more details, please click here.