Like Me is an indictment of a life spent “extremely” online: a thriller in which the thrill is the threat of empty transgression; a body horror flick in which the body horror is the way social media and Tumblr and Reddit and YouTube transform us, make us grotesque, perverting basic physical functions into scary, dysmorphic representations of the flesh sacks we carry around with us whenever we’re not online. Early in the film, writer-director Robert Mockler introduces us to the online world of our main character, Kiya (Addison Timlin, terrifying), via a disturbing barrage of hyperreal, gif-like images—close-ups of sugary cereal and milk chewed sloppily, of a viscous tongue mid-slurp, of Kiya doing weird kinesthetics in a dirty motel room while the camera capsizes and arises around her, this Manic Pixie Dream Girl who embodies each of those words as literally as possible. Though Mockler implies that these are all curated posts Kiya’s put online, we believe that this is how she sees the world. Aided by some seriously heady opioids and hallucinogens, she can’t help but digest her lived experiences without mitigating them digitally.
Mockler seems to understand that such an obsession gives Kiya a kind of authority, a sense of control over her world, even as it alienates her from pretty much everyone else. The film opens with a stunt perpetrated on some schmuck, Freddie (Jeremy Gardner), a clerk in a drive-up convenience mart. Wearing a bone-white mask, like a pixelated Eyes Wide Shut get-up, Kiya asks for milk (maybe the most filmable of all liquids) but then turns her phone’s camera on Freddie, waiting. The tension becomes unbearable as Freddie increasibly humiliates himself, unsure what’s happening but unafraid of the petite woman silently watching him…until she pulls out a gun, still filming, and orders Freddie on his knees. He begs for his life, and at the possible end of it, pisses himself. That’s all Kiya wants, even if she wasn’t sure until that moment that a grown man making minimum wage peeing his pants was something she wanted, so she shows Freddie that the gun isn’t real. Escaping back to her car, screeching away, Kiya breaks into laughter, horned up by what she’s done. Cue Mockler’s nightmarish credits.
Holing up in the aforementioned motel, binging on shit food and drugs, Kiya uploads the video of Freddie ruining his slacks and wakes to it having gone viral. She’s apparently achieved something: After watching the many varied YouTube takes and Vic-Berger-like remixes—Mockler prominently featuring a Milo Yiannopoulos stand-in, Burt (Ian Nelson), who calmly encourages the person who filmed the video to kill herself—Kiya continues on her ill-defined quest. She picks up an old homeless man (Stuart Rudin) and buys him dinner, insisting her tell her a story. Watching, we’re as nervous as he is, unsure whether she’s trying to be kind or about to commit something severely fucked up on this poor guy.