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PROFILE (2018) - FILM REVIEW (IN CINEMAS MARCH 11, 2018)

Profile (2018)



A journalist goes undercover and infiltrates the digital propaganda channels of the called Islamic State, which has been mobilizing a lot of women from Europe. Her daily contact with an ISIS recruiter severely influences her investigation.

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11 March 2018 (USA)  »

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Timur Bekmambetov’s film about a journalist investigating women online being lured to Syria is silly but effective.

Cinema is currently deciding how it meets the challenge of representing the way modern life and modern experience is increasingly happening online. The recent supernatural horror-thriller Unfriended had the ingenious idea of playing out its entire drama on one computer screen in real time, a kind of found-footage 2.0, switching between Facebook, Skype and instant messaging, the various prompts all bleeping and pinging away disturbingly as a sinister presence looms up. Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (who went to Hollywood in the last decade for brash and crass movies such as Wanted) has applied this approach to a thriller that asks the eternal question: what happens when cops or reporters with unsatisfactory home lives go undercover among people who actually treat them rather well?

Profile is based on the 2015 non-fiction bestseller In the Skin of a Jihadist by a French journalist who now has round-the-clock police protection and has changed her name to Anna Erelle. She was investigating the phenomenon of young European women being radicalised online and lured to Syria; Erelle created a fake profile on Facebook and began chatting to a senior Islamic State commander who then tried to lure her over, repeatedly promising her that she would be his “bride”. A very dangerous game.

Bekmambetov makes this journalist British. Amy (Valene Kane) has a rather quaintly imagined hectic private life – freelance career, money worries, devoted but dull boyfriend and insensitive boss. These people have to speak on Skype all the time so the relationship can play out on her laptop screen that we all see. It is contrived but it does hang together, just about, although Bekmambetov cheats it a little with speeded-up “time passing” sequences. Amy calls herself “Melody” for her story, wears a hijab and uses heavy makeup for her Skype chats with her Isis pursuer, who calls himself Abu Bilel, well played by Shazad Latif.

In the real world, Erelle finally agreed to the jihadist-seducer’s incessant demands for her to come to Syria. However, she had a photographer secretly in tow, planning only to get as far as Turkey to get a dramatic still image of her gazing across the border. But things got very scary and she bailed out.
Now, this central crisis – actually leaving the relative safety of the computer screen – is an important part of Bekmambetov’s fictionalised movie version. But there are no prizes for guessing why his Amy felt the need to go out to meet Bilel, and get as far as Amsterdam, before the terrifying situation revealed itself. What’s the point of a fictional undercover reporter who doesn’t feel the temptation to go native?


This approach is a little bit silly – there is nothing much in the script or performance to convince us that Amy really could be falling for Bilel or becoming discontented with her secular life in the west. And there is an uneasy and unconvincing transition when Amy at first paranoiacally refuses to work with the tech support guy helping her record the Skype conversations, because he has a Syrian background. She actually asks for someone else; her editor appears to agree – but then this same person reappears in the next scene, and becomes her regular liaison. The change of heart is not plausibly managed in the script.

And yet … the conversations between Amy and Bilel are capably performed, and there is a fair bit of suspense as we wonder if Amy’s cover is going to be blown. The simple spectacle of those browser screens, with all their mendacious social-media images, is very disturbing when made to work as part of a movie drama about deception – just as in Unfriended. However, that film took things to a different level of eerie disquiet on the question of identity and real presence. Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.




Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.



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