Who’d want to be a teenager today? Sure, for many teens living in the West there’s an immensity of privileges, but these come at a cost: more pressure, more scrutiny than ever. The Jane of this film departs the narrative in its very earliest scenes by committing suicide (off-camera, but clear). Scroll forward in time, and we meet her best friend, Olivia (Madelaine Petsch), who has swapped handling her grief for a punishing relationship with personal ambition. Everything is about college applications now. She follows a strict routine, imposed via her smartwatch, which is all gearing up to get her into Stanford: the extracurricular pastimes she takes part in are all engineered to improve her chances.
This would all be taxing enough, but the transfer of a new student, Camille (Nina Bloomgarden) rattles her immediately. Camille is a gifted debater; Olivia is currently head of the school debating society. When your sense of self is this brittle, then any shifts can feel like a disaster; add to that Olivia’s Stanford application getting deferred, and things feel even more desperate. But at least this crisis gets her talking to Isabelle again. Isabelle (Chloe Bailey) was a close friend of both Olivia and Jane, but had moved away from Olivia in the aftermath. They re-bond over an option which Izzy offers: to use the internet, do some digging, and find out if there’s anything in Camille’s past which could be used as leverage. In today’s climate, no one can ever – truly – leave their pasts behind, after all. But success in their scheme precipitates more scheming: by some happy fluke, it seems that Jane had left herself logged in on Izzy’s old laptop before she died. Who better than a dead girl to mix things up a little?
Olivia is an interesting character here. Never mind the fact that actor Madeleine Petsch is pushing thirty – though this feels like a noble cinematic and televisual tradition at this point – because she doesn’t look out of place in a high school setting, and she’s every bit as ambiguous as you’d hope she would be for a role like this. She’s immensely driven, sensitive to any slights or disadvantages, and this makes her – at least initially – reasonably sympathetic, but by the same token she is fractious, determined, scarily selfish. Izzy is more pragmatic, though the film begs the question of how accurate this impression is. She has her own secrets, and her own agenda. In many respects, she has more at stake than Liv; she enjoys many of the successes that Liv wants for herself. Embedded in all of this is commentary on the insanely competitive college entry system in the US, a mercenary and punishing process which would drive even the most benevolent student past their limits. Our key characters have to negotiate this, as well as their grief, which is clearly unresolved. It hangs over everything.
What’s interesting is how this grief is rendered into opportunity; it affords the girls various options, from teasing to bullying to far worse things. Jane appears as a kind of cipher for what’s really going on, particularly with Olivia, but what hits home even more successfully than this is the use of social media as a means of transgressing old, formerly inviolable boundaries. If you can be anyone, then you can say anything: the troll’s charter. Here, social media becomes a kind of devil’s bargain: when it’s being manipulated to provide certain opportunities and victories, you just know that the payback is coming. The media has changed, but the narrative arc has not. The film plays somewhat fast and loose with the logistics of social media – the log-ins, tracing IP addresses – but it still hangs together pretty well, driving at the central message that remodelling someone’s memory as you see fit will inevitably come crashing down. And many of the old rites-of-teen-passage scenes are there: the classroom, the high school party, the principal’s office. That hasn’t changed. Similarly, the world these girls inhabit is wealthier and more modern in many ways, but the milestones remain.
Jane (2022) has a bafflingly low audience rating on IMDb; sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. From this reviewer’s perspective, this is a decent, well-observed drama, and another entrant in the burgeoning genre of social media horror: as a continuing factor in the lives of so many, it’s no wonder we’re seeing more and more of them, with more and more disastrous and/or damning messages. Jane is psychological rather than visceral, but this is no discredit to the film. In fact, in its overarching message – one which only hoves into view at the end – it has plenty to say about success, and those who succeed. That’s most galling of all.
Jane (2022) is available to view now.