Taglines: Fake it till you break it.
Millie Lies Low movie storyline. Millie, an architecture student from Wellington, New Zealand, has landed a competitive internship with a prestigious firm in New York. After telling everyone she knows about the opportunity, she suddenly suffers a panic attack as her plane is about to take off, and misses her flight.
In a desperate pivot, Millie decides to save face by hiding in plain sight around Wellington, suitcase in tow, using Instagram and the power of denial to depict a trip to New York City that never happened. Trapped in a spiral of hilariously uncomfortable self-inflected scenarios, Millie will have to dig deep to restore her mental health and her dignity. Praised for capturing “the chaotic self-destruction of Fleabag and the anxious missteps of Eighth Grade,” (FilmDaze), Millie Lies Low is a poignant cringe comedy for our time.
No matter: Millie is already a seasoned fraud — she got her scholarship by stealing ideas from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen) — and so she uses technology to maintain the illusion that she crossed the international date line as planned. She places a video call to friends (forgetting to account for the flight lengths or the time difference) and fakes pictures of herself standing in Times Square and near the Empire State Building.
Wellington, with its steep hillsides, private cable cars and ringed natural harbor, could not pass for New York if you photographed it upside down and backward, and Millie’s act turns into even more of a stretch once she stakes out a spot by her mother’s home to poach the Wi-Fi and pitches a tent. In her first feature, the director, Michelle Savill, presents Millie’s motivations as self-destructive but understandable. Scotney, never quite mugging for sympathy, plays her well.
But given that Millie starts as an architectural plagiarist and moves into buffoonery as the film proceeds (stealing her boyfriend’s passport, kidnapping her own pet bunny), the screenplay’s efforts to redeem her face a difficult uphill climb. In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.
Millie Lies Low (2023)
Directed by: Michelle Savill
Starring: Ana Scotney, Jillian Nguyen, Chris Alosio, Sam Cotton, Karen O’Leary, Cohen Holloway, Alice May Connolly, Ariaana Osborne, Olivia Parker, Jack Sergent-Shadbolt, Kate McGill
Screenplay by: Michelle Savill
Production Design by: Heather Hayward
Cinematography by: Andrew Stroud
Film Editing by: Dan Kircher
Costume Design by: Sara Beale, Gabrielle Stevenson
Art Direction by: Aimee Cooki Martin
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Film Movement
Release Date: June 30, 2023
Millie Lies Low, Millie Lies Low 2023, Ana Scotney, Jillian Nguyen, Chris Alosio, Sam Cotton, Karen O’Leary, Cohen Holloway, Alice May Connolly, Ariaana Osborne, Olivia Parker, Jack Sergent-Shadbolt, Kate McGill
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