A Girl Like Her

“My Name is Avery Keller, and I am a bully.”

Written and Directed by: Amy S. Weber

The H-Bomb: After high school student Jessica Burns (Lexi Ainsworth) winds up in a coma following a suicide attempt, a documentary crew tries to get to the bottom of why this girl, with her whole life in front of her, would try to kill herself. While questioning a number of the students at the school, including Jessica’s best friend, Brian (Jimmy Bennett), a name that keeps coming up is Avery Keller (Hunter King), a popular student who used to be friends with Jessica, but has, as of late, been bullying her mercilessly.

We’re not just talking verbal abuse, but also physical abuse and online harassment as well. Text messages calling Jessica every nasty name Avery can dream up, and even telling her to go kill herself. Despite the fact that she rode Jessica non stop, Avery doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility for her suicide attempt. Or, at least she claims she doesn’t. The director of the documentary persuades Avery be a part of it, both by recording herself interacting with people at school, and by allowing the documentary crew to follow her home.

At first, Avery appears to come from an ideal suburban home, though looks can be deceiving. Without giving too much away of what happens from here, I’ll simply say that from watching Avery interacting with her parents, we can venture a pretty good guess as to where her domineering personality comes from.

While watching A Girl Like Her, which is filmed mostly as a faux-documentary, I was reminded very much of a real documentary I reviewed some time ago, Bully (2011). The similarities are obvious, as both films cover much of the same ground; teens getting bullied at school, on the Internet, and in a few sad cases, taking their own lives as a result. The scene in which the victim’s clothing is stolen out of a gym locker is pretty much a dramatization of a story told in that documentary.

There’s even a town hall meeting in here, where fed up parents angrily confront school officials and demand that they do something about this problem, and the school officials just pathetically sit there and shrug their shoulders, saying over and over again, “There’s nothing we can do.” Both movies do a fine job of highlighting the infuriating fact that the bureaucracy is totally fucking clueless as to how to handle this issue.

What separates A Girl Like Her from Bully, aside from one being a dramatized documentary and the other being an actual documentary, is that A Girl Like Her actually spends a significant amount of screen time with the bully, following her around, seeing things from her point of view. It’s designed to humanize Avery, to help us empathize with her, and to even make us see her as a victim, too. To an extent it works, however, writer/director Weber never lets us forget the terrible things Avery has done to Jessica, and how deeply Jessica has been hurt by it all.

In terms of shining a spotlight on bullying and how terrible and damaging it really is, A Girl Like Her is quite effective. Unfortunately, despite the hand held camera work and overall documentary aesthetic, this really is just an after school special, complete with moralizing, sermonizing, melodramatic writing, and uneven acting. Its heart is in the right place, but its over-earnestness hurts it. The dialogue at times doesn’t seem natural, and the utterly Hollywood ending, which of course I can’t reveal, nearly derails the entire film.

The performances of the two leading ladies are quite strong, and help elevate the picture above its Lifetime Channel movie trappings. Ainsworth has an innocent vulnerability that makes her endearing, and King has a role that appears shallow at first, but as the film wears on, we find there’s more to her than meets the eye. She pulls off this surprisingly complex character well. I was less impressed with Christy Engle as Avery’s mother, as her loathsome bitch of a character is one-note and over-the-top, though honestly, that’s more the fault of the writing than the actress. The guy who played her husband, though, Holy Fuck was he horrible! Goddamn! Thankfully, he only had a handful of lines, but Goddamn! Just horrid!

Anyhow, despite its flaws, A Girl Like Her is a film with an important, relevant message that it effectively drives home. As stated, it can be overly sincere at times, shamelessly tugging at the heart strings, though I would be a big fat liar if I said I wasn’t moved. I can’t help but think, if Weber had dialed back the theatrics just a bit, taken the Soderbergh approach, if you will, her film would have been all the more effective.