“It’s, like, really hard to keep making great content, you know?” says Kurt Kunkle (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) toward the start of Spree. “It’s a numbers game, and right now I’m a zero.” The wannabe influencer — known as @Kurtsworld96 — is the protagonist of Eugene Kotlyarenko’s social-media takedown, and goes much further than hashtagging or getting verified to get the all-important followers. The intent seems obvious — what would Travis Bickle be like if he joined the Twitterati (#AreYouTalkinToMe)? — but the execution lacks nuance, wit, insight, and even on its own satirical terms, a believable relationship to reality.
It’s a decent-enough premise but it never really develops into anything approaching a story.
In a quick supercut, Kotlyarenko details Kurt’s pathetic social-media game, videoblogging about everything from 9/11 (“real or fake?”) to his DJ father (David Arquette), but never getting his views into double figures. His failure is sharpened by Bobby, a kid Kurt used to babysit, who has become a social media star under the name @BobbyBaseCamp (played by Josh Ovalle, a real-life influencer apparently), much to Kurt’s anger. With no influencer coinage or freebies to sustain himself, Kurt spends his time driving for Uber-a-like car service Spree, which is where he gets his grand idea to boost his social following: #TheLesson. Fitting his car out with eight cameras, he gifts his passengers poisoned water bottles and lets them die in real time, all played out on his feeds.
It’s a decent-enough premise but it never really develops into anything approaching a story, instead opting for a series of not particularly imaginative murders. Kurt’s first victims include a white supremacist (Linas Phillips), a sexist playa (John DeLuca) and a group of Insta-obsessed party-goers (Frankie Grande, Lala Kent and — hey! — Mischa Barton) who in one of the more inventive kills get trapped in the car sunroof and savaged by dogs. A semblance of a through-line appears when Kurt picks up rising stand-up star Jessie Adams (Sasheer Zamata) and sees a way to bolster his followers by latching on to hers, but anything approaching a recognisable human relationship quickly withers.
The film’s saving grace is Keery, who balances charm, inane insights (“ABC — Always Be Charging”), psychotic undercurrents and an upbeat hucksterism that calls to mind Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. Kotlyarenko directs with bursts of energy, mixing up the imagery between iPhones, dash cams, IG feeds and CCTV footage to give it a picture-in-picture, split-screen aesthetic, like Brian De Palma dialled up to 11. But for all its modern stylings, Spree doesn’t have anything insightful to add around the need for likes and clicks — it makes its points through on-the-nose speechifying — or capture what it really means to live a life online. As blunted satire, Spree makes it very hard to smash that like button.