By: Andrew Wing

Not Okay is a 2022 American satirical black comedy-drama film written and directed by Quinn Shephard (feature film debut was Blame back in 2017). It stars Zoey Deutch (Why Him?, Zombieland: Double Tap) in the lead role, with Mia Isaac, Nadia Alexander (The Sinner), Embeth Davidtz (Mad Men, Ray Donovan), Karan Soni (Deadpool, Deadpool 2), and Dylan O’Brien (Maze Runner trilogy, Love and Monsters) in supporting roles.

The film follows Danni Sanders (Deutch), a young woman who desperately wants to be famous and beloved on the Internet, only for her efforts to lead to her mistakenly gaining fame as a survivor of a tragedy.

Not Okay was released on July 29, 2022, by Searchlight Pictures on Hulu.

THE GOOD

Ever since I saw the original trailer for Not Okay, I was hooked. Right from the get-go, you could tell that this movie was going to go directly at our society today and attempt to make points about what life is like on the Internet nowadays. Plus, it starred Zoey Deutch in the lead role, someone I am a huge fan of who I think is underrated, and also Dylan O’Brien. There’s just something about O’Brien that I like, and yeah maybe the Maze Runner films weren’t the greatest, but I still enjoyed them because of what he was able to bring to the table. So without saying another word, let’s see if Not Okay achieved its mission with what it set out to do with the film, or if it failed miserably. Keep reading to find out!

I think it got the job done. I think it definitely could have been better, but I’ll touch on that more later in the review, but for now, I want to praise it. Not Okay was a fun movie, and I loved all of the performances, but it was also very dramatic and I loved how they were able to switch the tone of the film from time to time. A big reason they could do that so well was because of Quinn Shephard, the writer and director of the film. This is only Shephard’s second feature film (I have yet to see the first), and I was really impressed with what she did here. This is one of the most modern movies I have ever seen, and I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much. But I wasn’t expecting all of the dramatic and more climactic moments of the film to hit as hard as they did just because of Shephard being somewhat new to this, but man was I wrong. All in all, I was just really impressed by her and I look forward to watching what she does next!

As good as Shephard made this movie, it was taken to the next level by Zoey Deutch. This is the second film of Deutch’s I have seen this year after The Outfit (see my full review here), another film that she starred in alongside O’Brien, and one of my complaints with that film was that we didn’t get enough Deutch in it. However, with Not Okay, I got as much of Deutch as I could ever have asked for, and I loved every second of it. I was just blown away by what she was able to do here, and while she usually has been more of a side character thus far in her career, I really see this film being a sort of breakout role for her that shows the world that she has what it takes to be a leading lady in a film. Seriously though, she did it all in this. She was hilarious and charming at times, but she was also evil and alarming at the same time. At the end of the day, I just thought it was a flawless performance from Deutch and my fandom of hers just continues to grow at this point.

Now onto the supporting characters in Not Okay who all made their presences felt. First with my guy Dylan O’Brien because duh, I thought he was awesome in this. He plays the comedic relief character Colin who is a social media influencer who is inked up and loves smoking weed, and he was just so fucking funny with every line of dialogue he spoke. There is one particular scene that my Mainers will love in this too, but I won’t spoil it. The next supporting performance that needs to be mentioned belonged to newcomer Mia Isaac. Now I said that Deutch’s performance was a breakout one, and the same can be said for Isaac’s. She was phenomenal here as she played a character who survived a school shooting and Isaac just expertly conveyed the character’s emotional trauma she was going through. And lastly, I really liked the performance Nadia Alexander gave us in this. Alexander, who is actually writer/director Quinn Shephard’s partner in the real world, was great as the most normal and best human being in the film.

In conclusion, there were a lot of other things I appreciated when it came to Not Okay. It was edited very nicely and I thought it flowed smoothly for a 103-minute-long movie, so shout out to Mollie Goldstein. The cinematography we got of New York City from Robby Baumgartner was solid, and the music choices for the movie that were done by Pierre-Philippe Côté helped tell the film’s story. Oh, and one final thing, I just really appreciate Searchlight Pictures and all the other distributors for taking a chance on an original story from a young filmmaker like this that really needed to be told because we need more films like this that are able to both tell important messages and still be somewhat entertaining.

THE BAD

If you haven’t caught my drift by now on how I felt about Not Okay, well you must have skipped a paragraph or two. For real though, I had a good time with this and I was pleasantly surprised. However, when it comes to films that try to make points about society, you need to grade how they did, and I would give Not Okay probably a B there. It did a good job and we can definitely come away from the film with ideas, but where I think this film got hurt was the fact that it almost tried to tackle too many provocative ideas, and what ultimately ended up happening at least for me was that they didn’t fully land on all of them.

Now that’s a tall task, but for example, I think it really showed itself at the end of the film. I don’t want to give too much away, but I was just expecting something totally different. I’m not saying that I was expecting the main character to get vindication for what she had done or that she even deserved to, but I just didn’t see her story ending the way it did. But hey, that’s the challenging thing when you make movies about really unlikeable “protagonists”, and you never know, maybe we will get a sequel and see what happens next for the Danni Sanders character.

THE VERDICT

While it never fully committed to the seriousness of the points it was trying to make, Not Okay is still a wickedly funny satirical black comedy from writer/director Quinn Shephard that features a star-in-the-making kind of performance from Zoey Deutch as the villainous Danni Sanders.

I was really impressed with Shephard’s filmmaking style, I loved Deutch, and I thought all of the supporting performances were incredible from Mia Isaac’s breakout role, to Dylan O’Brien’s absolutely hysterical performance of a character that resembles Pete Davidson in today’s world.