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.
Director:
Timur BekmambetovStars:
Language:
EnglishRelease Date:
11 March 2018 (USA) See more »Company Credits
Production Co:
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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