Luckiest Girl Alive

Ani FaNelli works at a magazine in New York, is engaged to a rich man and has built a life designed to look flawless. A documentary director calls: he is making a film about the shooting at her high school and offers her a chance to clear her name, since the story that has circulated for years casts her as an accomplice rather than a victim. When she goes back, what opens is not the shooting but what happened before it. Mike Barker directed. Jessica Knoll adapted her own novel. Mila Kunis stars. It went out on Netflix on 7 October 2022. The story behind the book is heavier than the film. In 2016 Knoll published an essay in Lenny Letter revealing that the gang rape in the novel had happened to her. She was attacked by three boys at a party when she was fifteen. The first person to tell her it was rape was a therapist, seven years later. There is one more detail in the essay: after calling it rape once during a drunken confrontation with one of them, she phoned back the next day, frightened of the social consequences, and apologised to him for calling him a rapist. The reviews were largely negative, faulting the tone, the thin construction of the characters and a script that reaches for easy resolutions. What they agreed on was Kunis. Who it is for: viewers who want a story about trauma and Kunis in a dramatic part. Who it is not for: anyone sensitive to the subject. The assault is shown directly and the film does not soften it.