This startling documentary suffers from narrow execution.
Taylor is going for her graduate degree in engineering at a technical college in Connecticut. She's a rare female in a male dominated field when someone sends her a porn link to videos that she made. The problem is, she has never appeared in a porn video, and discovers the horrific world of deepfake revenge porn. The act is illegal in very few states (when this was shot), so she begins collecting evidence and tries to find out who has been posting these online.
In an effective scene, we find out Taylor is an example of the deep faking that she is fighting against. Taylor isn't her real name, and the face we've become familiar with isn't hers, as well. Her college is fictitious, and so are the faces of the other victims of the guy who they figure out is cyberbullying them to this extreme degree. I admire this ploy by the filmmakers because it shows how easy it is to create this type of video, and hopefully stops the real Taylor from being exploited all over again if she had used her real face in the film.
Thanks to another documentary, "Pornocracy," I know the evils of free porn sites online. You think looking at some free scenes is harmless, until you get the stories behind the scenes. Add this documentary to the cautionary genre of the internet. Taylor and other victims' faces were borrowed from such normal websites as Facebook and Instagram, and the video makers use VPN technology to remain hidden, and more often than not, authorities find themselves helpless to enforce laws that don't exist.
I wish the filmmakers had opened up the scope of the film. Having Taylor and her newfound friends (including the ASMR YouTuber Gibi) deduce who was doing this is misleading. It could be anyone out there, and narrowing it down to a weird former friend gives some viewers the wrong idea about who might be ruining their lives. Anyone can do this to anybody! Otherwise, this is a topic that needs further coverage and serves as another reason to dump social media altogether (I literally did just that two days before I watched this).
Stats:
(2023) 80 min. (7/10)
-Directed by Sophie Compton, Reuben Hamlyn
-Written by Sophie Compton, Isabel Freeman, Reuben Hamlyn
-Featuring Ava Breuer, Faith Quinn, Julia Weinberg, Gibi
-(Not Rated)- Mild sexual violence, strong profanity, strong sexual content, strong sexual references, strong adult situations
-Media Viewed: Blu-ray
