In recent years the often stipulated demand for ‘strong female characters’ has generated approval from some and generated censure from others who find it sometimes didactic or inappropriate.  Less remarked is the concurrent trend in popular culture by some creatives to eschew role models and instead offer up flawed often morally ambiguous female characters who act as an analogue to the traditional male anti-hero.

Examples of modern female anti-heroines would be Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s alienated TV character Fleabag and the clever, successful but dangerously delusional protagonist of Jason Reitman’s 2011 movie Young Adult played by Charlize Theron.  This model of an anti-heroine, who engages audience sympathies while capable of selfish, egregious and destructive actions appears to be what the director Sabrina Jaglom had in mind for the protagonist of Jane, her new psychological thriller.  Her success in this is moot and her insistence on trying to keep audience sympathies onside by constantly downplaying her heroine’s culpability threatens the credibility of the movie generally and especially in the way it plays out.

Jane(Chloe Yu) concerns our protagonist, Olivia(Madelaine Petsch) and her best friend, Izzy(Chloe Bailey), the survivors of a trio of best friends at an exclusive all girls’ school in a wealthy American suburb.  The third girl, the eponymous Jane, previously committed suicide, an event for which Olivia seems to feel a disproportionate sense of responsibility for.

Olivia and Izzy discover a social media platform belonging to Jane is still extant and the friends use it in various score-settling ways.  In these Izzy is usually the proactive party and only Olivia evinces any guilt.

Generically Jane comes closest to the format of psychological thriller.  However the makers decide to include potentially supernatural details.  At Olivia’s most morally compromised moments an image of the dead Jane appears before her like a silent, sullen teenage Jiminy Cricket.  A later detail about entries on Jane’s social platform deleting themselves and implying the ‘ghost’ may be more than a figment of Olivia’s imagination, goes nowhere.

The end of the movie threatens to upend it completely.  The friends fall out and after a tussle Izzy accidentally dies.  After framing the death as a suicide Olivia then creates a charity and dedicates it to her ‘suicidal’ friend.  Jane appears again but Olivia simply fixes her with an enigmatic smile.  This ending only seems to be there because the film-makers thought it smart and fashionably cynical.  It seriously militates against what we have seen of Olivia before.  Sometimes single-minded and ruthless, nothing about her behaviour has pointed to this utter brazenness.

Purely as a thriller, Jane passes muster with its excellent cinematography, editing and convincing dialogue.  As Olivia and Izzy, Medelaine Petsch and Chloe Bailey give assured, confident performances.

 As the study of an anti-heroine, it falls far short.  Because its protagonist’s actions, seen purely objectively, mark her out as a nasty piece of work, Jaglom’s insistence on trying to keep her sympathetic to an audience, often through disingenuous means such as shunting responsibility onto her friend, just seems like special pleading.