Millie Lies Low (2022)

This was just all too contrived for me. “Millie” (Ana Scotney) is about to fly from Wellington to a new life in New York when she has a panic attack on the aircraft. Terrified and unable to breathe, she gets off the thing but rather than tell her folks and friends that she had a turn, she proceeds to pretend that she has actually arrived. To that end, she hits social media with chats and photographs whilst all the while hovering around her home neighbourhood without a cent to her name. Desperate, she is swiftly reduced to petty theft and living in a tent before she is recognised by someone and her lies start to spiral into something altogether more ridiculous. Scotney actually does fine here, but the story goes nowhere fast and after the initial quirkiness of the start, this just resembles a script-writers convention where they all got together and created a series of scenarios that could have come straight from a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon - only these are not particularly funny. What I did find interesting was the extent to which characters obsess about living their lives online. Most of her predicaments here are entirely due to “Millie” being incapable of stopping lying and constantly making matters worse by laying a false trail of breadcrumbs. Who cares? She comes across as a fairly selfish and uninteresting woman right from the get-go, and any attempts to get to the bottom of her anxieties are well and truly subsumed in a “badass” sea of mediocre predictability. Maybe it might work better on a big screen with an audience full of beer and good will, but otherwise it’s pretty disappointing.