Imagine adding a beautiful woman on social media, then saying ‘hi’ to her, only to not get any response. You send another ‘hi’; it is seen, but still nothing. Now you are pissed, wondering why she would even add you if she doesn’t want to communicate. In case you’ve ever experienced this, then you might be an incel. Beautiful Friend, an eighty-minute-long film by director Truman Kewley, is an exploration into the incel’s mind and the whole subculture. It is unapologetic, not at all subtle, and the approach is very brash. Unsurprisingly, it is an extremely difficult watch, and even though it’s a very cliche saying, faint-hearted people should probably avoid watching.
Not that they are going to meet anything substantial. Because no matter how good the intention or how relevant the topic is, as a film it feels quite extra. Calling it unnecessary would probably be a bit too harsh, but a whole lot of Beautiful Friend could have been edited out and it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s clearly not a good sign for a film that’s only eighty minutes long.
At the center of Beautiful Friend, we have this incel, Daniel, an amateur filmmaker. I thought making the guy a filmmaker was sort of a genius move, given ‘cinephilia’ is a common incel trait and it gives them a sense of superiority. Anyway, all would have remained right if Daniel was just an incel, but he is an angry one who refuses to accept the fact that his dream of getting together with a woman and experiencing what normal people consider to be ‘love’ is never going to be fulfilled (it shouldn’t either, just saying). So he is out with his van, scavenging for a viable target during the early days of COVID-19. Yes, Beautiful Friend happens to be a product of the pandemic genre as well, which does help its narrative. Daniel’s plan is to kidnap a beautiful woman and then make her fall in love with him and go the whole nine yards of romance. That is obviously ludicrous to say the least, but he gets on with it. We see him fixating on different people from time to time—getting frustrated about random women having boyfriends or husbands (because how dare they?)—before finally deciding on a target—Madison. Daniel kidnaps Madison, puts her in his van, and takes her out to the middle of nowhere. From there on, things go exactly as you would expect. And this movie makes it a point to show you everything terrible that happens to Madison. It is very difficult to sit through the following scenes and watch this girl getting abused by this maniac, but I feel that’s exactly what the director is aiming for—to make you, the audience, uncomfortable.
However, what I cannot fathom here is the reason for director Kewley to show the horror in this manner. It is of course a creative choice, but how exactly does Beautiful Friend benefit from showing Madison getting raped? Any woman or non-incel man is only going to feel disturbed, while a majority of the incel community might just be stoked with that scene, which is a terrible outcome. Sure, we can talk about artistic freedom here, but I fail to find any kind of justification for the sexual abuse that is being shown in Beautiful Friend. This is not Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017), where the rape victim does get the opportunity to give it back to the perpetrators in a very fantastical, cinematic way that provides a kind of euphoric excitement to the audience. I don’t always bring up other films while talking about a specific film, but that film also delivered the same social commentary as Beautiful Friend, but handled it much better.
Of course, it cannot be denied that Kewley’s film aspires to be a bone-chilling horror, and it does succeed at that. What you see on screen is something that could very well happen to anyone you care about or to yourself, and the thought of it is troublesome. However, the chill Kewley wants you to feel gets somehow diluted because of the film’s protagonist, Daniel, constantly narrating what’s going on inside his head. Sure, it is important for us to see the story from his perspective, but that doesn’t mean the whole film has to be overloaded with monologues. These are of course frustrating to hear, but also badly written and repetitive at certain points. It also causes another big problem for actor Adam Jones, who plays Daniel, as his dialogues and narrations sound similar. There can be an argument about Daniel—being a social misfit—only knowing to speak like that, but from a cinematic perspective, it also makes the film drab.
The high point (or should I say selling point) of Beautiful Friend has to be telling the story from the perspective of the incel psychopath. I can’t help but to think of In A Violent Nature here, which came out this year only, which told a slasher story from the killer’s perspective. But the best thing about that film was it not giving the killer any words and relying fully on visual storytelling. Sadly, Beautiful Friend does the opposite of that, and it becomes the reason for the film suffering and tormenting its audience in a bad way.
I probably would have still lauded Beautiful Friend if it was a fifteen-minute short instead of an eighty-minute long feature. With the kind of cinematography and editing this has, the same story would have been far more effective in a short span. That would have also filtered out everything that was unnecessary, including the scene of Madison getting raped—the one that bothered me so much. There’s no denying that Beautiful Friend is still an important film and might just make more people aware of this disgusting incel culture. Perhaps that’s where its success lies, despite being a lesser film.