Tribeca ’26: ‘DEEPFAKE’ Is a Cringey Brooklyn Satire of Faux-Influencer Culture

A bundle of sage burns inconspicuously in an apartment window. A plate is shattered. A woman weeps in the shower. Jane has just been dumped. These are the opening moments of Matt Eames’ Deepfake, a satire about influencer culture, loneliness, and the increasingly transactional nature of modern relationships that never manages to dig much deeper than this bland tableau of heartbreak.

Jane Kittery (Jessica DiGiovanni), a 32-year-old female project manager freshly separated from her boyfriend, obsessively tweaks her online dating profile in hopes of becoming more appealing to potential matches. With each revision she attempts to sound more agreeable, more interesting, less desperate. When that strategy fails, she turns to a growing ecosystem of gig-economy companionship services designed to provide the intimacy and validation missing from her life.

First comes Zoe (Sophia Lucia Parola), a rented best friend acquired through a service called BFFer, essentially a paid companion whose primary responsibilities are active listening and emotional support. Think ChatGPT in human form: endlessly agreeable, relentlessly affirming, and seemingly devoid of needs of her own. Soon Jane hires additional consultants to optimize her wardrobe, social media presence, makeup, photography, and personal brand. Before long, an entire support staff has assembled around the project of manufacturing a more appealing digital version of Jane that doesn’t exist in the slightest in real life.

It’s a premise ripe for satire. Unfortunately, Deepfake rarely discovers much beyond the obvious observations sitting on its surface. The film aims to skewer the insecurity and performative nature of influencer culture, but its commentary seldom moves beyond familiar territory. Yes, social media encourages people to curate idealized versions of themselves. Yes, personal branding can feel hollow and transactional. Yes, outsourcing increasingly large portions of our lives raises uncomfortable ethical questions. These are all valid observations. The problem is that Deepfake rarely deepens or complicates them.

Compounding the issue is Jane herself, who proves a difficult protagonist to spend time with. Her failures as a romantic partner and friend seem less rooted in social pressures than in her own profound self-absorption. Nearly every interaction revolves around her needs, her anxieties, her aspirations, and her disappointments. She rarely appears curious about the lives of others, turning conversations into monologues about her self and her woes, each new relationship merely an opportunity to gripe about the wrongs done unto her. The film clearly intends her behavior to be cringe-inducing, but cringe comedy still requires escalation, insight, or self-awareness. And funny moments. Too often, Deepfake simply feels exhausting and unfunny.

To the film’s credit, there is an interesting idea buried somewhere beneath the surface. As Jane outsources more and more decisions about @NYCJane82’s “personality”, she gradually erodes whatever authentic self may have existed beneath the performance. Her apartment becomes a staging ground for an increasingly artificial, click-baity life. The more people she hires to help construct her image, the more isolated she becomes. Eventually she even employs a younger, more attractive body double, pushing the concept of self-manufacturing to its logical extreme.

Yet even this potentially compelling descent into self-erasure never quite lands. The film gestures toward larger questions about identity, authenticity, and the commodification of human connection, but rarely develops them into anything particularly insightful. Worse, nearly everyone inhabiting Jane’s orbit is as opportunistic, performative, and emotionally vampiric as she is, creating a world populated almost entirely by people the audience will struggle to care about.

Movies about pathetic people can be work wonders. Some of the best comedies and dramas ever made are built around deeply flawed protagonists or situations so deeply uncomfortable that the cringe is infectious on a cellular level. The problem isn’t that Jane is unlikable. It’s that Deepfake never finds enough humor, humanity, or revelation beneath her dysfunction and self-absortion to justify spending ninety minutes in her company.

Deepfake feels like the work of a filmmaker searching for a voice, experimenting with ideas about identity, modern loneliness, and the commodification of human connection in the social media era. The problem isn’t a lack of ambition so much as an inability to find enough sharp edges to wrestle this concept into something interesting and poignant. What’s left is a satire that feels more observant than insightful and more cringeworthy than funny; a film that spends ninety minutes critiquing manufactured authenticity while never quite developing an authentic voice of its own.

CONCLUSION: Matt Eames’ Deepfake tackles timely ideas about influencer culture, app-mediated relationships, and manufactured identity, but never discovers enough reason to make this feel clickable. More cringeworthy than funny and more observant than insightful, this social media satire struggles to find an authentic voice of its own.

C

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