MILLIE LIES LOW - Mark Reviews Movies

Millie Lies Low, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 29, 2023

The concept of Millie Lies Low—which is comedy, lest the following be taken in the wrong way—is inherently terrifying. Co-writer/director Michelle Savill's film revolves around a young woman who would rather create an intricately layered and tangled web of lies, deceit, and general falsehoods than face any kind of embarrassment. There's a lot more to Millie (Ana Scotney), of course, but that's the basic premise of why she decides to concoct an elaborate, mostly impromptu scheme after abandoning what should be a dream opportunity for her.

Like Millie's plan, Savill's film is an impressive juggling act. It's one of tone and sympathy, giving us a main character whose situation is both dire and understandable—mostly, on both counts, because it's brought about entirely by her own actions and attitude toward herself. She knows what she's supposed to do, but sitting on a plane that's ready to take off from Wellington to New York City, something inside Millie announces quite loudly that she simply can't and shouldn't do it. The result is a panic attack, although Millie also knows she's not supposed to be having those, and that thought only adds to the cycle of self-doubt and the need to appear as if everything is "normal."

That's how we meet Millie: sitting on the plane, with a look of sheer terror overcoming her face, and finally rising out of her seat, desperately trying to convince someone to let her off the flight before it takes off or to open the cabin door herself. "It happens more often than you think," someone at the ticket counter tells her, after Millie denies having a panic attack—chalking it up to an "emergency" involving some bad salmon at the food court—and learns that there's no chance she'll be getting any kind of compensation for missing her flight. A ticket for an alternative one, by the way, is too expensive, too.

There's no comfort in that sympathetic statement, though, because, now, Millie has a decision to make. She can either be honest to her friends, her mother, and the people waiting for her in New York about what happened, or Millie can pretend that nothing happened at all—that she's doing exactly what she's supposed to be doing at this moment.

The first option appears to be unthinkable to Millie, given the various texts of explanations and excuses Millie considers sending to her best friend Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen) as she waits around the airport and takes a bus back into the city proper. Nothing she could say about what happened feels right. It's a testament to Scotney's performance that so much of what we know and come to understand about Millie is so effortlessly communicated by the actor in the silence of experiencing these emotions and assessing various, increasingly untenable choices.

Instead, she goes online, finds a photo of clouds looking out from a plane window, and posts it to her social media account, proclaiming that she's on her way to this exciting new chapter of her life (The tiny detail of parsing how many exclamation marks is appropriate for the caption should give one a sense of how considered the film is). From there, the situation becomes messy, obviously and to understate matters.

It's funny, too, despite how harrowing her deception is, since she has to find places to sleep and work toward a way to afford another ticket to New York, and how complicated our feelings toward Millie start to become. She's a college student, recently offered a scholarship to study architecture in New York but convinced that she's an imposter.

In a way, it turns out, she is, because the project that helped her receive that scholarship is coincidentally similar to the one Carolyn made. If she can lie about something as consequential as being on the way to and starting a life in another country, can we really believe that the similar projects have resulted in some kind of creative "osmosis," as she tells a professor (played by Sam Cotton) who's surprised to see her still in Wellington? Is her entire life, interest in architecture, and career trajectory just a series of schemes like the one she's currently undertaking?

In addition to being a clever and convincing display of the relative ease ("borrowing" other people's photos) and specific challenges (trying to stage and edit photos to make it look as if a person is somewhere else) of executing such an act of deception in a world of cellphones and social media, Savill and Eli Kent's screenplay serves as a complex character study. Here, we get to witness someone becoming a genuine imposter, simply because she has grown up believing herself to be one. Some of that stems from her past, being bullied as a child for having grown up outside of New Zealand as the child of missionaries, and some of it comes from real or perceived pressures from her mother (played by Rachel House).

Mostly, though, the film depicts a high-wire act of technological, practical, and psychological evasion, leading Millie into perilous, potentially fraudulent, likely criminal, self-destructive, and, ironically, even more embarrassing scenarios. It's funny, because the ruse necessitates multiple acts of the awkward and absurd varieties—from flirting with the professor, preventing him from asking too many questions, to abducting a rabbit in order to distract attention away from someone who discovers Millie's lie.

It's also frightening and slightly tragic, because we do come to comprehend why Millie is compelled to go to such great lengths to keep up the appearance of what people expect of her. Millie Lies Low is a comedy filled with such situational and psychological tension that it almost feels wrong to laugh.

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