(Credits: Neon)

Long before the term “influencer burnout” flooded our feeds, a little Netflix gem quietly saw it coming. Ingrid Goes West, a 2017 dark comedy starring Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen, might not have used the term, but it understood the feeling better than most documentaries ever could.

The film follows Ingrid Thorburn, a woman who becomes fixated on Instagram influencer Taylor Sloane. After a public meltdown and a brief stint in a mental health facility, Ingrid decides to move to Los Angeles. Her goal? To befriend Taylor and, in the process, become someone new. Someone better. Someone worth watching.

What starts off feeling like a quirky comedy slowly turns into something far more uncomfortable. Ingrid is not chasing fame in the traditional sense. She just wants to be seen. She wants to be liked. She wants to live the kind of life that looks good in a square frame. That alone makes this one of the sharpest Netflix films about social media’s emotional toll.

Ingrid starts curating her identity, mimicking Taylor’s every move. From outfits to restaurants to captions, it is all a performance. But as anyone who has lived too long online knows, pretending is exhausting. And that is exactly what influencer burnout is. It is the mental drain of constantly staying relevant, entertaining, and picture-perfect. Ingrid might not have the followers, but she feels the pressure just the same.

What makes the film brilliant is that it never needs to explain the concept directly. You just feel it. The anxiety. The loneliness. The dread of being forgotten. Ingrid’s spiral is played for laughs, but there is something deeply sad about it. The more she posts, the emptier she gets. And when she finally goes viral, it is not for a picture-perfect moment. It is for a breakdown caught on camera.

Even Taylor, the influencer at the centre of it all, is faking it. Her life looks effortless, but it is curated down to the second. Her happiness, her marriage, even her friendships are props in a never-ending content machine. She, too, is stuck performing a version of herself that might not even exist anymore. That quiet exhaustion? That is burnout, too. But wrapped in aesthetic filters.

Ingrid Goes West predicted this emotional collapse long before creators on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram began publicly quitting or breaking down. Now, burnout is a common thread. Influencers talk about therapy, detoxes, and digital breaks. They admit they are tired of performing. Ingrid’s story feels like the first draft of that cultural conversation.

And it is not just about influencers either. The film taps into a deeper, more relatable idea: what happens when your self-worth becomes tied to how you look online? Whether you have ten followers or ten million, that kind of pressure chips away at you. Slowly, then all at once.

There is no neat moral at the end. No grand moment of healing. What Ingrid Goes West gives us instead is a quiet reminder that constant visibility comes at a cost. That being perceived all the time can be just as isolating as being invisible. It is one of the few Netflix films that saw the influencer age clearly, before we even realised how deeply it would affect us.

So if you are in the mood for something smart, sad, and way too real, give this one a watch. It might be about Instagram, but its message hits far beyond the screen.