ith flashbacks suggesting a twisted twist, Luckiest Girl Alive works in a similar vein as Gone Girl. You see the astronomical disparity between a white, conventionally beautiful woman’s outward poise and inner mayhem. There is a lot more going on, though, in this #MeToo tale starring and produced by Mila Kunis. The #MeToo theme is awkwardly mixed with issues of gender and class, resulting in a slightly unwieldy and unfocused film. Aside from tackling women’s struggles with “having it all,” Luckiest Girl Alive introduces a fiercely ambitious protagonist who is haunted by trauma and internalised shame tied to her gang-rape ordeal.

Ani (Mila Kunis), the self-loathing magazine writer, who becomes the “luckiest girl alive”, has achieved three status symbols: a prestigious education through a scholarship, an envious figure with the help of an eating disorder and a prestigious fiancé won over through suppression of her emotions. A marriage to Luke Harrison IV (Finn Wittrock), belonging to a social elite class, will help her transition from TifAni FaNelli (played in flashbacks by Chiara Aurelia) into her intimidating new identity as Ani Harrison — provided that she stops fantasising about stabbing the man in the neck.

The mystery begins when Ani shops with Luke for wedding registry knives and imagines them dripping with blood. It builds further when a documentary filmmaker (played by Dalmar Abuzeid) approaches her. Throughout the film, Ani is portrayed as a survivor who was blamed for a 1999 school shooting that killed several classmates and paralysed Dean Barton (Alex Barone). This was traumatic enough. But the flashbacks to her life as TifAni reveals her true reason for reinvention and downfall, as she recalls her younger self – a financial-aid sophomore at a private school who loves English, feels embarrassed by her “gauche” middle-class mom (Connie Britton) and likes to party. Having her memories fluttered by alcohol and trauma, the film depicts the horrifying sexual assault that shatters Ani’s life. As a teenage girl reeling with guilt and anger at the pressure to report by her English teacher (Scoot McNairy), and bullied by friends Arthur (Thomas Barbusca) and Ben (David Webster), Aurelia gives an excellent performance.

Mila Kunis tries to convey Ani’s pain and suffering beneath the apparent stone-heartedness, but her performance is drenched in clichés. Instead of a depiction of a woman learning to express herself, the film tells the story of an ideal victim: someone who endured a tragic accident; whose pain was totally misinterpreted and questioned; who built a life only to have a dark secret undo it; and then rose to the top.

As she recovers from a high school gang-rape aggravated by a mass shooting, Ani has a stream of horrific flashbacks. Through these connected tragedies, one of Ani’s abusers — played as a student by Carson MacCormac and as an adult by Alex Barone — becomes a smug public moralist. Ani, now an adult, finds herself in a quandary about what to say, especially now that one of her assailants has attained a level of prominence. As a documentary maker raises difficult questions about the tragic school shooting that occurred when Ani was a student at the elite Brentley School, memories of the sexual assault she endured there — at a time when she received little support from her socially ascetic mother (Connie Britton) — flood back. She is also concerned that speaking out may somehow jeopardise her future on the road to society’s upper crust. Why, as the beautifully ignorant Luke puts it, confront “this incident that happened to you so long ago?”

Ani flaunts success like an armoured vest up until she has run-ins with her mother, her former teacher and the documentary maker, who prompt her to re-evaluate her sham. She has been striving to be “someone people can respect” by gaining a position at The New York Times Magazine. It may be overly ambitious, but Luckiest Girl Alive feels like a story that keeps jumping between the mass shooting and Ani’s story in an attempt to connect them in a way that jumbles up the mystery.

Even though the film is primarily about Ani’s trauma, it seems to justify the deaths of the other children depicted in barbaric detail. In fact, it juxtaposes the trauma of rape victims and those affected by gun violence in competition for people‘s attention and societal action. Sure, the film shows the events via Ani’s lens, but that does not excuse the film’s portrayal of a school shooting as a mere backdrop for her personal journey.

It is a pity that that the film’s promise of a thriller does not exactly lead to anything surprising. Kunis tries to convey Ani’s pain and suffering beneath the apparent stone-heartedness, but her performance is drenched in clichés. Instead of showing a woman learning to express herself, the film tells the story of an ideal victim: someone who endured a tragic accident; whose pain was totally misinterpreted and questioned; who built a life only to have a dark secret undo it, and then rose to the top. Parts of Luckiest Girl Alive do shed some light on a life shattered by trauma, with relief at having unburdened themselves, with the thrill of playing with female cultural expectations. The story, however, is rather hollow with an ending that seems like a #MeToo pipe dream.

The writer is a freelance contributor