‘Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape’ review: A loving homage to an internet oddity

Underground net persona Kati Kelli died in 2019, abandoning six years of her weird, avant-garde YouTube sequence Lady Web Present. Lovingly curated by filmmakers Jane Schoenbrun (I Noticed the TV Glow) and Jordan Wippell (Kelli’s widower), the loosely related program is refashioned in cinematic type, albeit with minimal interference, in Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape.

The movie is, because the title suggests, a playlist of assorted sketch movies run again to again, adopted by Kelli’s first brief movie, which was accomplished simply days earlier than her loss of life from bronchial asthma. This successfully makes it essentially the most uncooked and unfiltered doable big-screen adaptation of her absurd work and eccentric persona, making for a surreal, enjoyable, and disorienting 79 minutes.

What’s Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape about?

With minimal interference, Wippell and Schoenbrun let Kelli’s comically disturbing work converse for itself, solely offering transient textual content playing cards in the beginning and close to the top for a smidge of extra context. All we actually learn about Kelli when the compilation begins is that she was homeschooled in Los Angeles.

This element additionally proves subtly revelatory, however earlier than it ever comes into play, the viewers is whipped forwards and backwards between ostensible video shitposts with low cost results and narcissistic characters in a litany of wigs and outfits. The entire thing has a frenetic, DIY vlogger really feel from the years earlier than low cost however efficient cameras and gear have been available, à la ring lights for Zoom conferences. Nevertheless, Kelli’s rudimentary gear looks like no hurdle to her gonzo creativity; actually, her constraints improve her aesthetic as one thing emanating from a lonely bed room, made with no extra assist.

That we by no means see anybody else is mildly curious — typically it seems as if her digicam is being operated by hand, however she additionally provides digicam shakes in publish manufacturing to create a handheld really feel. Largely, her work feels singular and unusual, from her echoing sound results and her casually macabre tone, to her mommy-blogger sketches wherein she enacts hilariously twisted violence on dolls, all whereas sustaining a sunny disposition befitting of a mainstream private model. It is cute and regarding unexpectedly, a disconnect that runs by way of most of her sketches.

Lastly, her brief movie Complete Physique Elimination Surgical procedure performs as a coda to the mixtape, permitting us to see Kelli with on-screen collaborators for the primary time, albeit with the very same esoteric vibe and no-budget method. Nevertheless, what’s principally clear by this level is that, regardless of how playful and unserious her work may appear, there is a prescience to it too.

Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape predicts the web’s future.

Kelli might not have been a literal soothsayer, however she tapped into the place on-line leisure was headed, and the way it was slowly reshaping tradition, and she or he regurgitated it in splendidly bizarre methods. Shades of future vlogging norms might be glimpsed in her parodies as nicely, particularly the extremely personality-driven content material that now guidelines the YouTube algorithm.

However regardless of her topic, Kelli all the time appeared to ship her most acerbic jokes with sincerity. Spoofs and satires might be so simply laced with venom, however Kelli’s asides about her “mansion” and her quite a few sped-up catwalks do not a lot make enjoyable of way of life, trend, and make-up vlogging — kinds nonetheless of their infancy on the time — as they merely mirror and refract the net world because it existed on the time, and as it will proceed to develop.

One character particularly, a dissatisfied, upper-class spouse named Marva, is especially enjoyable to observe, in a Brian Jordan Alvarez sort of method, whereby her affirmations disguise a deep malaise. This dissonance between presentation and actuality underscores just about all of Kelli’s movies. It is an ideal operating gag regardless of wherein course her humor darts off — however on the identical time, it proves self-reflexive too.

Whereas merely urgent play on a video mixtape might not match the normal confines of filmmaking, crediting Kelli as the author, director, and editor permits Wippell and Schoenbrun to current her as she might have needed to current herself. Nevertheless, watching all these works in fast succession additionally threads an necessary thematic needle.

Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is a movie about loneliness.

Between Kelli’s homeschooling, the truth that her work appears made with little to no assist, and that she usually offers in broad caricatures of popular culture (a few of it Kardashian-esque), it is laborious not see her as alone not directly. Schoenbrun’s involvement is essential right here, as each their movies — I Noticed The TV Glow, however particularly We’re all Going to the World’s Honest — cope with haunting types of millennial ennui. The latter even revolves round on-line creepypasta and video challenges as a window to emotional connection, with a protagonist who friends out into the void by way of her webcam.

It is laborious to not see echoes of Schoenbrun’s work on this movie, or fairly, causes Schoenbrun may need been drawn to Kelli, who appears to equally peer out into the world from an remoted vantage. Her characters and eventualities all have hints of the true world, however appear to course of actuality by way of layers and filters of leisure, like actuality TV. Kelli greater than seemingly had associates — Wippell might have even been holding the digicam at occasions, although that is left unclear — however the model of her that results in her movies, and her droll authorial voice, appear desperately lonely.

From its low cost compositing and repetitive cuts to its eerie silences and harsh noise, Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape joins the ranks of latest web-saturated movies (alongside The Folks’s Joker) that speaks the language of the burgeoning web, as a device to precise oneself and discover connections. It is little question hyper-specific in its conception — few exterior of underground style festivals will even discover themselves — however the movie can also be liberating in a method, as a montage of discovered footage that helps carve out a cinematic house for off-beat outsider artwork from a spot of disguised, disfigured honesty.  

Lady Web Present: A Kati Kelli Mixtape was reviewed out of its screening at Implausible Fest.