‘Sorry, I’m such a disappointment to you, Mum.” “We can’t all be appointments.” That’s the fumbling, poignant way of this debut comedy-drama from New Zealand director Michelle Savill, clearly a highly personal piece of work in its detailed character study of would-be architect and social-media blagger Millie, played in charmingly evasive style by Ana Scotney.
Millie has a hot ticket from Wellington to New York for an internship at a blue-chip architecture firm, but has a panic attack and disembarks before takeoff. In denial about what’s happened, and unable to admit her failure, she decides to keep up the pretence online, dropping in a cut-and-paste of an airplane window into her Instagram feed (“A new adventure begins!!!!”). And she digs herself in deeper, taking Skype calls from her friends in alleys that mimic New York brickwork and hanging around in disguise at their house party to overhear them pick fault with her.
Savill, who co-wrote with Eli Kent, sets her stall out with a perfectly plausible satire on online fakery, and the tawdry reality behind the idealised, globalised lifestyle to which so many aspire. But she mines something more compelling in how Millie dips almost into delusion; the excited gleam in her eyes that says she is addicted to her own fictions. Savill excels at understatedly layering in backstory – such as the architecture-school security guard commenting on her plagiarism, or the Philippine folk dance she is forced to do by her mum (Rachel House) – that gradually reclines us into her deeper insecurities.
Savill leaves the understatedness behind for a cringe-masterclass of a scene in which Millie both finds out about her boyfriend’s infidelity and finally drops her hoax. But it’s still only the beginning of the end in a personal reckoning that Savill shoots in a deceptively casual style, while dropping in mordant background details such as the huge scholarship poster at the airport with Millie plastered on it. It’s a testament to Scotney’s performance that Millie retains a perverse kind of integrity even as she dupes herself more than the people around her. A shrewd and promising debut.
• Millie Lies Low is available on digital platforms on 22 August.
