The Image of You is not just stupid; it’s Fight Club-stupid. I don’t think you can spoil a bad movie. After all, to spoil means “to ruin; to damage (something) in some way making it unfit for use,” and The Image of You was that way when I found it. For what it’s worth, though, spoilers ahead.
This is the story of a woman who is her own evil twin. When Anna (Sasha Pieterse) confronts her fiancée Nick (Parker Young) with the accusation that “you cheated on me,” and he replies, “I cheated with you,” he’s not rationalizing his behavior. Anna literally impersonated her late twin sister Zoe (who committed suicide three years ago) and seduced Nick. So it’s not a matter of “cheated on” or “cheated with;” technically speaking, Nick didn’t cheat.
That, of course, doesn’t stop Anna from faking her own death (or, to be more specific, restaging Zoe’s death as a murder) and threatening to incriminate Nick. Additionally, Anna kills her own father, David (Nestor Carbonell), also for being a cheater, and Nick’s sister Rebecca (Michele Nordin) because why not? Anna’s mother, Alexia (Mira Sorvino), is briefly shocked, but she quickly gets with the program.
Let’s start with the technical aspects. I’ll put it like this: I find it easier to believe that Dove Cameron is two different people in Liv and Maddie, and that’s a 10-year-old Disney Channel sitcom.
That said, do you really have to go the dual-role route? We’re not talking Nic Cage in Adaptation. Instead of one relatively unknown actress, why not two relatively unknown actresses who happen to be actual identical twins? (like in Identity Crisis). And yes, even if one of the twins is a hallucination.
Which brings me to my next point. Director Jeff Fisher did the old ‘oh look, Ed Norton was fighting himself all along’ trick, and I still don’t buy it. There’s an early scene of Anna and Zoe walking and talking. Toward the end, we see the quote-unquote same scene again, revealing that Anna was talking to herself.
First of all, this arbitrary switching of viewpoints is, in one word, cheating. It means everything can be anything at any given point in time, with no regard for common sense. And it’s not even a Rashomon-style deal where one character sees something and another sees something else; it’s just Fisher jerking us around. I know all about unreliable narrators, but that doesn’t work when it’s the filmmakers whom we can trust because they were making shit up as they went.
Second, it’s a blatant insult to the audience’s intelligence. We’re not dumb, deaf, or blind. We know what we saw and heard, and we know that the movie’s accounts of a single event contradict rather than complement one another.
We witnessed Anna having a back-and-forth exchange with her imaginary twin sister Zoe. It follows that Zoe’s half of the conversation took place only in Anna’s head. By the same token, only Anna’s half should be audible. But then it turns out that Anna was doing both sides of the conversation out loud. That shit don’t fly.
Either Anna has a split personality and they share the same body (sometimes at the same time, apparently), or she is a schizophrenic and Zoe is a manifestation of her psyche. It’s either one or the other, but it can’t be one and the other whenever the script finds it convenient to switch between the two. This kind of sloppy storytelling violates the implicit trust between the viewer and the filmmakers, and leaves the audience feeling manipulated rather than engaged.
And since we’ve moved on to storytelling, let’s talk about the twist. I’m not a fan of twists because they seldom twist the action in a different direction. They’re not the set-up they ought to be, but rather expected to be their own payoff. The Image of You is no exception.
A rich, white woman with zero redeeming qualities (no wit, no charisma, no nothing) kills innocent people and lets other innocent people take the fall, and we’re supposed to go home happy because she Keyser Sözed us? At least The Usual Suspects is enjoyable until the cop-out ending. That’s a lot more than I can say for The Image of You, with its constant split screens and Pop-Up Texting.
So Anna was the villain all along. So what? What are we meant to do with that information? Even without entering moral considerations (see below for that), from a narrative perspective, it’s still an incomplete story — an anecdote, at best.
Okay, you’ve revealed the true nature of the evil. That’s good. The problem is that the tale is not over until the evil is vanquished. This tale has a dead-end twist in lieu of a resolution, and that’s too much to ask of what is essentially nothing but a well-worn gimmick.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman wrote that a proper ending is not necessarily a happy ending, “but a satisfying one, a reward for a journey concluded, a secret revealed, a mystery solved.” In The Image of You, the “secret revealed,” the “mystery solved,” is not “a reward for a journey concluded,” because it’s artificial, mendacious, and just plain unsatisfying.
Maybe David deserved to get got; at least he knew what he was doing. How is Nick a bad guy, though? And what about poor Rebecca? There is no justice for the victims any more than there’s punishment for the perpetrator.
It’s not about everything being tied up neatly with a bow, but about restoring some sort of balance in the end. I can do without Good Triumphant, but I gotta have Evil Conquered. Otherwise, why am I even watching?
And now for those moral considerations. There are two possibilities here. Either Anna is, like I just said, evil, or she’s insane. If she’s purely evil, she knows the difference between right and wrong. The question is, do the filmmakers?
Perhaps we’re supposed to be impressed that Anna got away with murder. What Fisher and writers Adele Parks and Chris Sivertson didn’t seem to realize is that Anna’s is far from the perfect crime. Too many people know about it, including the viewers.
We know why and how she did it. We know that her end doesn’t justify her means nor, for that matter, are her means an end in themselves. We can’t in good conscience condone her goal, and piss-poor execution precludes us from admiring her methods.
And if Anna is insane, then the film only perpetuates the social stigma of mental illness (but then what would you expect from a screenplay that thinks dropping F-bombs left and right is an accurate portrayal of Tourette’s syndrome?).
There’s nothing you can do for Anna other than play along with her. She can’t be helped, so no one ever even tries to help her. And I mean professional psychiatric help and/or prescription drugs (never mind that in the movies, antipsychotics tend to get a worse rap than crack, coke, and smack).
All things considered, art has a twofold obligation: to entertain through compelling narratives and to educate through meaningful themes. The Image of You fails miserably on both. This film is petty, ignorant, and ugly — a cynical, nihilistic exercise in misanthropy.