Profile
**Seen at the 2021 Atlanta Film Festival.
For me, Timus Bekmambetov means stylized action and insane plotting. So in that way, “Profile” is completely different from the director’s previous work, whether you’re thinking “Night Watch” and “Day Watch” or “Wanted” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” You would also think that Bekmambetov was responding to the challenges of a COVID world with this film, since the action takes place predominantly over Skype, in front of a computer screen, but “Profile” debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018. No matter; “Profile” is a tense thriller, and will grab you early on with its narrative.
Amy (Valene Kane) is an investigative journalist in London working on a story about how ISIS recruits women. In the mid-2010s, an alarming number of white women in Europe began to leave their lives, convert to Islam, and go fight with ISIS in Syria. As part of her research into this trend, she sets up a false profile for herself, Melody Nelson, and hopes to be reached out to by someone from ISIS over Facebook and social media so she can expose their tactics. What happens if she begins to care about her recruiter, Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), herself?
“Profile” is based on a novel by Anna Érelle, which Bekmambetov and his co-writers, Britt Poulton and Olga Kharina, streamline in a way to be told entirely via computer screen shots on chat sessions and video calls. It’s an inspired, low-fi approach to the material, because it keeps the film focused on the rabbit hole of online radicalization. That has become a hot topic recently, with discussions of social media algorithms that influence our media output so that we stay online. Unfortunately, sometimes that leads us to propaganda that allows us to be sucked in by extremists, but hey, so long as we keep watching, right? That’s for a different film to explore, however; “Profile” is what we often think about when we think about radicalization. It begins with a friend request on Facebook after you “like” something, and then the chats start, then the video calls, then you’re getting married online and going to Syria where, if you realize the mistake you made, and want to mistake, you might be stoned to death first. In a way, this sounds like an overblown moral panic, but is it any different than what neo Nazis or other extremists did before the internet to get recruits? The difference is that it’s online now, and that’s where it gets terrifying.
Amy and Bilel are the main players in this film; we see Amy’s boyfriend Matt, her boss Vick, and an IT guy named Lou who helps her record her conversations with Bilel for the story, but Bekmambetov keeps us focused on them. Do we recognize a moment where Amy’s investigative angle ends, and a potentially romantic development begins? There’s a moment late in the film where Bilel is possibly killed, and she doesn’t act like a rational journalist anymore. Was that moment staged by Bilel to test her resolve? Some of the questions we find ourselves asking by the end are complicated ones, and Amy has to answer them honestly before it’s too late. “Profile” is terrifying, and probably hits the mark more than we’d like to admit.
