'You Get Me' Review: Never Listen to the Netflix Algorithm

By Dustin Rowles | Streaming | February 23, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Streaming | February 23, 2018 |

You Get Me, an original Netflix film released last summer, is terrible, and no one should watch it. If Netflix inexplicably recommends this movie to you — as it did me — you should think long and hard about letting an algorithm choose your movies for you based on the fact that you watched three episodes of Santa Clarita Diet. The Netflix algorithm is wrong, and it should be ashamed of itself.

Upside: I can now positively identify Bella Thorne.

You Get Me is what would happen if Cinemax decided to make a PG-13 late-night skin flick. Directed by Brent Bonacorso — whose only credit of note is a Katy Perry music video in which she sings in the snow and gets hit by a car — the movie sees Tyler (Taylor John Smith) get into an argument with his girlfriend, Alison (Halston Sage) at a party one night after Allison’s ex-boyfriend tells Tyler that Allison gives a great blowjob. Distraught over the break-up, Tyler leaves the party with a woman he just met, Holly (Bella Thorne), and ends up having a one-night stand with her.

Soon thereafter, Tyler gets back with Allison, who forgives him for being a little shit about her previous sex life. But twist: Holly transfers to their high school and continues her inexplicable obsession with Tyler (who hardly seems worth the effort of a minor fixation, let alone a full-blown obsession). She commences a campaign of winning Tyler’s affection by nearly killing one of his best friends via allergic reaction, stalking Tyler, killing a woman, and nearly murdering Allison because everyone knows that the best way to a man’s heart is by putting a bullet into his girlfriend.

It sounds far more lurid than it is. Written by Ben Epstein (who wrote AN episode of 10 Things I Hate About You), the plot is generic, the dialogue mundane, and the characters flat, listless, and boring. The performances are also horrific, as though the actors were reading the script for the very first time from cue cards as the camera was rolling. It is an immeasurably awful, pathetically dumb movie that’s not even worth the hard drive space it must be taking up on the Netflix servers. There is neither a believable or thoughtful moment from the beginning of the film until the end, when spoilers, Holly shoots Tyler in the shoulder, Allison stabs Holly, and she is taken away in an ambulance, where she develops a new obsession with a paramedic.

You Get Me badly wants to be a teenage version of one of those female stalker films like Obsessed or Unforgettable, but it can’t even get the one-word title right. It’s a third-rate version of a second-rate Lifetime movie that even Redbox would reject as too generic. But Netflix probably paid $5 million for it because the Netflix board of directors won’t let Reed Hastings throw matches on piles of money so he does the next best thing: He spends it dumpster fires like You Get Me and then alters the service’s algorithm to ensure that it comes up on the Netflix app more times than a racist meme backed by Russian bots pops up on your Facebook feeds.

Ignore that algorithm, and watch Everything Sucks instead. It’s perfection.