‘Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape’ review: A loving homage to an internet oddity

Underground web personality Kati Kelli died in 2019, leaving behind six years of her bizarre, avant-garde YouTube series Girl Internet Show. Lovingly curated by filmmakers Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) and Jordan Wippell (Kelli’s widower), the loosely connected program is refashioned in cinematic form, albeit with minimum interference, in Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape.

The film is, as the title suggests, a playlist of various sketch videos run back to back, followed by Kelli’s first short film, which was completed just days before her death from asthma. This effectively makes it the most raw and unfiltered possible big-screen adaptation of her absurd work and eccentric persona, making for a surreal, fun, and disorienting 79 minutes.

What is Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape about?

With minimal interference, Wippell and Schoenbrun let Kelli’s comically disturbing work speak for itself, only providing brief text cards at the beginning and near the end for a smidge of additional context. All we really know about Kelli when the compilation begins is that she was homeschooled in Los Angeles.

This detail also proves subtly revelatory, but before it ever comes into play, the audience is whipped back and forth between ostensible video shitposts with cheap effects and narcissistic characters in a litany of wigs and outfits. The whole thing has a frenetic, DIY vlogger feel from the years before cheap but effective cameras and equipment were readily available, à la ring lights for Zoom meetings. However, Kelli’s rudimentary equipment seems like no hurdle to her gonzo creativity; in fact, her constraints enhance her aesthetic as something emanating from a lonely bedroom, made with no additional help.

That we never see anyone else is mildly curious — sometimes it appears as though her camera is being manually operated, but she also adds camera shakes in post production to create a handheld feel. Mostly, her work feels singular and strange, from her echoing sound effects and her casually macabre tone, to her mommy-blogger sketches in which she enacts hilariously twisted violence on dolls, all while maintaining a sunny disposition befitting of a mainstream personal brand. It’s cute and concerning all at once, a disconnect that runs through most of her sketches.

Finally, her short film Total Body Removal Surgery plays as a coda to the mixtape, allowing us to see Kelli with on-screen collaborators for the first time, albeit with the exact same esoteric vibe and no-budget approach. However, what’s mostly clear by this point is that, despite how playful and unserious her work might seem, there’s a prescience to it too.

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape predicts the internet’s future.

Kelli may not have been a literal soothsayer, but she tapped into where online entertainment was headed, and how it was slowly reshaping culture, and she regurgitated it in wonderfully weird ways. Shades of future vlogging norms can be glimpsed in her parodies as well, especially the highly personality-driven content that now rules the YouTube algorithm.

But no matter her subject, Kelli always seemed to deliver her most acerbic jokes with sincerity. Spoofs and satires can be so easily laced with venom, but Kelli’s asides about her “mansion” and her numerous sped-up catwalks don’t so much make fun of lifestyle, fashion, and makeup vlogging — forms still in their infancy at the time — as they simply reflect and refract the online world as it existed at the time, and as it would continue to grow.

One character in particular, a dissatisfied, upper-class wife named Marva, is particularly fun to watch, in a Brian Jordan Alvarez kind of way, wherein her affirmations hide a deep malaise. This dissonance between presentation and reality underscores pretty much all of Kelli’s videos. It’s a great running gag no matter in which direction her humor darts off — but at the same time, it proves self-reflexive too.

While simply pressing play on a video mixtape may not fit the traditional confines of filmmaking, crediting Kelli as the writer, director, and editor allows Wippell and Schoenbrun to present her as she may have wanted to present herself. However, watching all these works in quick succession also threads an important thematic needle.

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is a film about loneliness.

Between Kelli’s homeschooling, the fact that her work seems made with little to no help, and that she often deals in broad caricatures of pop culture (some of it Kardashian-esque), it’s hard not see her as alone in some way. Schoenbrun’s involvement is key here, as both their films — I Saw The TV Glow, but especially We’re all Going to the World’s Fair — deal with haunting forms of millennial ennui. The latter even revolves around online creepypasta and video challenges as a window to emotional connection, with a protagonist who peers out into the void through her webcam.

It’s hard not to see echoes of Schoenbrun’s work in this film, or rather, reasons Schoenbrun might have been drawn to Kelli, who seems to similarly peer out into the world from an isolated vantage. Her characters and scenarios all have hints of the real world, but seem to process reality through layers and filters of entertainment, like reality TV. Kelli more than likely had friends — Wippell may have even been holding the camera at times, though that’s left unclear — but the version of her that ends up in her videos, and her droll authorial voice, seem desperately lonely.

From its cheap compositing and repetitive cuts to its eerie silences and harsh noise, Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape joins the ranks of recent web-saturated films (alongside The People’s Joker) that speaks the language of the burgeoning internet, as a tool to express oneself and find connections. It’s no doubt hyper-specific in its conception — few outside of underground genre festivals will even find themselves interested — but the film is also freeing in a way, as a montage of found footage that helps carve out a cinematic space for off-beat outsider art from a place of disguised, disfigured honesty.

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape was reviewed out of its screening at Fantastic Fest.