Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of sexual assault, rape, gun violence, and PTSD.
Directed by Mike Barker and based on the novel of the same name by Jessica Knoll, who wrote the screenplay, Luckiest Girl Alive is a dark and dramatic thriller. It follows Ani FaNelli (Mila Kunis) during a particularly trying period in her life. A writer for Women’s Bible, a women’s health magazine, her job is to focus on stories about sexual pleasure, primarily that of heterosexual men. She’s up for the role of Editor of New York Times Magazine and this is her primary goal along with her fast-approaching wedding, just six weeks away, to Luke Harrison (Finn Wittrock). With her career and love life at important junctures, she is suddenly forced to look back at a tragedy from her teenage years; a school shooting in high school. Directly following the tragedy, her schoolmate Dean Barton (Alex Barone), paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the attack, insinuated that young Ani (Chiara Aurelia) was privy the shooting that was going to happen beforehand and might even have participated in the event.
Returning to the present day, a documentary filmmaker, Aaron Wickersham (Dalmar Abuzeid) has contacted Ani to get her side of the story. Dean, now a popular gun-control advocate will be interviewed for the film. Ani’s carefully constructed life begins unraveling as she relives that day and the events leading up to the shooting. Luckiest Girl Alive uses nonlinear narration to tell Ani’s story both in the present and through flashbacks of the past, depicting how her life changes after deciding to take part in the documentary. The nonlinearity is a perfect representation of her headspace in the present day because she herself is having flashbacks. So this way, the audience is watching through her point of view.
Ani is living a perfect life, ready to marry the perfect husband, and on her way to the perfect job. As one might expect, it’s too perfect to be real, but the illusion isn’t where we’d expect. She isn’t pushing herself to personal and professional perfection to convince others that she’s perfectly fine. On the contrary, it’s an illusion she’s set up specifically for herself. Her personality is the embodiment of Frank Sinatra’s famous words “the best revenge is a massive success”. Unfortunately, her vengeance is against none other than young Ani herself. She’s an unreliable narrator but the trope has a twist. The lack of reliability here isn’t a conscious choice on the part of the narrator, in stark contrast to Agatha Christie’s novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is widely considered to have made the narrative trick mainstream.
Ani derives satisfaction from people pleasing at her own behest. She allows her fiancé’s opinions to define her behavior around him — like how much food she should eat — in front of him, her table etiquette is refined and the moment he steps away, she’ll consume food like an “animal” as she states. The current focus of her journalism career is about pleasuring the male sexual partner, I believe this is a hidden attempt on Knoll’s part to give us a glimpse into her psyche. In one scene, Ani states, “Sometimes I feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I’ll tell you exactly what you wanna hear.” There’s a tone of discontentment and sorrow in the delivery of that line. It’s as though she’s telling us that she wishes she wasn’t that way, but there’s also a sense of pride in the declaration like she’s proud of the fact that she can bend anyway the wind blows and thus never break. Or perhaps this is how she’s enacting revenge on herself for her lack of resolve as a teenager.
It’s fairly late into the narrative that Ani’s sexual assault is revealed to audiences. During a house party after a school dance, she is raped by three male peers and friends. It’s clear that Ani is hiding a traumatized girl and a woman desperate for her truth to be validated within herself. People-pleasing, intrusive thoughts about violence and a general inclination to give everything an outward look of perfection are all, among others, tell-tale signs of dealing with trauma. While she’s out with Luke putting a wedding registry of cutlery together, she experiences an intrusive thought and imagines stabbing Luke with the knife she’s holding. This happens again at a dinner with Luke and her high school professor. Ani imagines stabbing her fiancé’s hand with the table knife after he makes a dismissive comment about the upcoming documentary. When the school shooting is brought up, it’s clear that the trauma she’s hiding isn’t only about surviving the shooting. She doesn’t say it out loud but insinuates through her attitude about Dean, that there’s more to the story.
One lesser-discussed consequence of trauma is displaced anger. It’s especially common in adults who have had adverse experiences during their childhood. Luckiest Girl Alive depicts this case of displaced anger with clinical accuracy with Ani’s misdirected vengeance. Ani never reports her rapists to the authorities. She didn’t want to have to confront them or feel the shameful gaze of her Mother, who must be informed in order to involve the police. As an adult, she’s content with not telling the world her side of what happened during the school shooting or about her rape. She’s dedicated herself to becoming a completely different person, inside and out, drastically changing her physical appearance by dieting and having a breast reduction. Ani defines herself by the darkest incidents in her life but refuses to let others do so and that’s why she’s comfortable staying silent.
However, if she shared her story with the world, it would no longer be just hers. And her personality would appear hollow to herself because it’d seem like it’s built on others’ perceptions. If she’s the only one judging herself by these standards, she can treat herself like a project, but if the world were to become privy to her story, she’d lose agency. Even in loss, there’s control, but only as long as we’re the ones choosing what we lose. Ani’s illusion of perfection is a form of control she exercises over herself. She hasn’t forgiven herself for becoming a rape victim. Consciously, she knows it was her rapists who stole her agency and she loathes them for it, but subconsciously, she holds herself accountable. That’s why she punishes herself by creating the visage of an ideal life, instead of the life she wants. What she genuinely wants is of no concern because Ani has dissociated from her true self to cope with her trauma.
Known in high school as TifAni, — “Tif” by her friends — she detaches herself from the person she used to be by dropping the Tif. She even rectifies someone at her office who calls her TifAni, by saying “Ani is pithier”. And that’s not just the name. Ani seems to be just a segment of the complete person TifAni, specifically molded to fit Ani’s current headspace with respect to both her future aspirations and her past trauma. Everything worth preserving of who she was, to contribute to creating the perfect life remains. While everything else has been buried along with the story of her rape. I do not intend to generalize for all victims of abuse, but having been a victim of physical abuse in high school and having experienced this particular consequence myself, I can vouch for the accuracy of the depiction of misdirected anger in Luckiest Girl Alive. It’s the primary reason I’m here advocating for it as a brilliant exploration of trauma.
Ani finally agrees to do the documentary because of the sad realization that she’s made herself a wind-up doll as a consequence of events that weren’t her fault. Her decision to do the documentary begins the journey of redemption she needed as opposed to what she thought she’d achieved by creating the perfect life for herself. The first stand she takes is confirming to Aaron that she’s to be referred to as a victim and not a survivor. This is an acknowledgment that she still feels powerless. She thought she had survived and succeeded because she had created an untouchable reputation and men could no longer control her fate, but when asked to label herself, she chooses the word victim, without hesitation, almost angrily. Underneath the “powerful woman” she projects herself to be lives a scared victim who never healed from her trauma. So much so that she feels intimidated by tender sex and only enjoys rough sexual activity because she’s subconsciously associated sex with violence since her assault. This is demonstrated when Luke requests her to slow down when she takes initiative in lovemaking and becomes increasingly rough with him, biting his lip. She eventually pushes him away after he takes over and touches her tenderly.
She’s finally reconciling the gap between Tif and Ani, slowly beginning to merge her inner self with the alter-ego she had molded out of contempt. In a show of unbelievable strength, she openly acknowledges her trauma and its effects on her, not once, but twice. To two men — the one that haunts her past, and the one who she is supposed to create her future with. She says it out loud, “I don’t take my anger out on anyone other than my fucking self”. We know from her body language that this is the first time she’s said these words out loud. While the moment is heartbreaking, it’s also affirmative because she’s finally accepting her situation and is ready to start the healing process. She no longer wants to hold herself accountable or keep her story hidden. She has found agency in the truth instead of carefully constructed faux perfection. She admits to Luke, “I don’t know what’s me and what part I invented to make people like me.” She is confronting her habit of lying to herself and I cannot stress how cathartic these two scenes are.
Ani’s journey isn’t really affected by what kind of documentary Aaron makes but by how she’s affected when participating in it. The story is hers and as long as someone else is telling it, she’ll be in the passenger seat. With her self-destructive patterns, she’s spent her entire life in the passenger seat, being driven by her idea of success. Whether realizing it or not, she’d been living off external validation. While her persona was developed as a punitive means of restricting herself and as armor to shield herself, it was only the approval of others that kept her going.
Being able to deflect the criticisms of others but still feel under-confident enough to need external validation sounds paradoxical. Yet, I myself have lived through those patterns, and Luckiest Girl Alive provides me a sense of visibility I hadn’t expected to find. Moreover, the way Ani slowly inches her way back to the driver’s seat by consciously distancing herself from the situations and people that allowed her to thrive by lying to herself feels powerfully reminiscent of my own attempts to break away from self-destructive patterns.
While I don’t intend to launch into an unsolicited personal essay, this is definitely key to why I loved Luckiest Girl Alive so much. It’s a very harrowing watch if you can identify Ani’s pattern of behavior. In the end, the film rewards viewers’ patience by giving Ani her moments of confrontation and giving us a glimpse of how her healing journey begins. I saw myself reflected in the ways her trauma had manifested and also in the way she struggled through the film to acknowledge, let alone accept, that her perfection is entirely apparent. As a portrayal of the impacts of childhood trauma, it’s devastatingly honest. The way Ani denies her truth even to herself left me feeling drained at the halfway point because it came too close to my reality, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Witnessing Ani take her power back, finding love for her inner teen, the part of herself she’d shunned and kept quiet for most of her life, gave me just the sense of revival I needed.
I’m grateful to Baker, Knoll, and the entire crew for making the journey visual and not just emotional. A special thanks to Kunis, who perfectly embodied the damaged persona I never thought would get portrayed so accurately and Knoll for creating this character and story. It has its narrative flaws and its execution isn’t perfect, but Luckiest Girl Alive is a powerful film in its depiction of trauma.
