Olivia (Madelaine Petsch, a regular from streaming series Riverdale) is a senior at an exclusive all-girls high school in an unidentified but posh-looking US suburb. Clearly hothoused from a young age by her bougie parents, Olivia’s one burning, all-consuming ambition is to get into Stanford University. To that end, she has turned herself into hard-working, top-stream student, captain of the debating society and all that jazz. She has even bought sweatshirts with the name Stanford emblazoned across the chest. But she has checked the numbers and knows that the admissions board will probably only take two or three students from her school, so there is a lot of unspoken tension between her and other students who want to attend this vastly expensive west coast university.
That produces horrible pressure for these young minds, and as the film starts, one of Olivia’s best friends, Jane (Chloe Yu), has killed herself for reasons never quite made clear. When a new girl at school (Nina Bloomgarden) threatens Olivia’s supremacy of the debating society, Olivia vents about it to her old friend Izzy (singer Chlöe Bailey), also once a friend of Jane’s. Olivia and Izzy discover they have access via an old laptop to Jane’s account on a (fictional) social media platform, so they start using this ghost account to throw shade on Olivia’s rival, humiliate a teacher they don’t like, and so on. But it starts to feel as if the account is being controlled by some supernatural force, and Olivia imagines she can see Jane everywhere.
Director Sabrina Jaglom, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rishi Rajani, taps into an interesting species of female neurosis turned toxic, as if she is making a mashup of Heathers, Election and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. She ambitiously opts to keep it ambiguous throughout as to whether Olivia is losing her sanity, legitimately haunted or the instigator of a problem that she can’t control. The ending doesn’t resolve anything neatly or even satisfyingly, but there is a palpable, platonic chemistry between Petsch and Bailey as best friends turned frenemies that is authentically compelling. And it is refreshing to see a film focus so much on the complex intricacies of female relationships but that has nothing to do with sex, either between the young women themselves or with men, who barely feature here.
• Jane is released on 13 February on digital platforms.
