Iconic is one of those films that looks great on paper: A slick, high-concept piece on the dangers of influencer culture, our tech-saturated reality, and the blurred line between online performance and human authenticity, but spun on its head to lean more into the unsettling disconnect from reality angle. Add in some gore, Dutch angles, and ritualist cult practices, and you’ve got yourself a little something for everyone. In theory, at least, it’s a fascinating premise. In practice, the movie feels like it’s juggling too many ideas at once and never commits fully to any of them, leaving us jonesing for more impact, more exposition, just more.
The film really hits the ground running, wasting no time in getting right to the meat of the story. Beauty and lifestyle influencer Rose lives the glossy, glamorous life of an Insta model: Her every move is practised, her every look polished. Her apartment feels more like the set of a trendy photoshoot than a place one could actually live comfortably in, and her every waking moment is spent vlogging, modelling, or scrolling the comment section of her own videos. Iconic portrays Los Angeles’ seedy underbelly very well here by giving us the vibe of filth and decay barely concealed beneath a shiny topcoat.
Almost immediately, we see the cracks in Rose’s veneer. She is vapid, shallow, self-centered. She doesn’t actually care about her followers or the products she promotes, something we see early on when we learn that another influencer suffered horrible chemical burns while shilling one of Rose’s products on her own channel. She offers no apology, no sympathy, and admonishes anyone who criticizes her for her part in the scandal. Rose is not a likeable character, nor is she meant to be. She is a cookie-cutter representation of an influencer and everything society dislikes about them, and the audience is dragged along with her as her life goes from chic and glamorous to gritty and depraved.
Director Matthew Freiheit leans hard into a dreamy, almost hallucinatory style—gorgeous in flashes, but also disorienting. The use of bold, colourful sets and catwalk-ready fashion gives the film a surreal quality that leaves the viewer feeling somewhat starstruck at times. However, the eye-catching cinematography can, more often than not, feel distracting and overly artsy. Think “last twenty minutes of Mulholland Drive,” but not in a good way. When every scene feels like a surreal fever dream, it becomes difficult to tell when characters are actually hallucinating and when the story wants us to take things at face value. The result is less “commentary on our fractured perception of reality” and more “wait, what exactly is happening right now?”
There are still things to admire. The film’s ambition is undeniable, and its visuals often stun, like glossy ad campaigns gone just a little rotten. And thematically, there are identifiable (if a little muddled) bits of social commentary and philosophical questions here: the way social media can warp identity, the toxic pressures of performative perfection, the erosion of genuine connection in the digital age. But instead of drilling deep into any one of those, Iconic skims the surface of all of them, leaving the film feeling more like a really long trailer than a fully realized movie.
Iconic isn’t a bad movie—its creative camerawork and ambitious narrative make it too interesting to be dismissed outright. But it’s also too scattered to land the punch it’s aiming for. The story Freiheit is trying to tell here would make a fantastic movie. Actually, it would make several outstanding movies if you were to detangle the various plot threads and give each its own film. However, Iconic just isn’t that film. It’s convoluted, confusing, and tries to be too many things simultaneously. Is it a horror movie about the occult? A psychological thriller documenting a woman’s descent into madness? An anti-drug PSA? A commentary on the insidious nature of social media? We’re never really too sure, and, like scrolling endlessly through social media itself, the film leaves you overstimulated, intrigued, and yet somehow unsatisfied by the end.
Iconic (2024) is now streaming on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu.
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As lover of cryptids, literature, and all things horror, I am so excited to be bringing my talents to the Grimoire of Horror. I am a librarian, avid gamer, TTRPG nerd, and a Mothman fangirl. I spent several years screening films for PRIMAA’s Canadian film festival Reel Shorts, and spent some time as an amateur horror filmmaker, competing in the Frantic 48 filmmaking challenge several years in a row. I love anything horror, from true crime to grindhouse to found footage and am especially interested in horror books and movies created by LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC as I think we have a fresh take on the genre and a fascinating perspective on what horror can be.