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“Profile,” based on a journalist’s undercover investigation of an Islamic State recruiter, is inventive, well-acted and one of the most tense movies of the year so far.
British investigative reporter Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) is writing about the phenomenon of European women and girls being recruited to join Islamic State. She crafts a fake Facebook profile as “Melody Nelson,” a 19-year-old recent convert to Islam, and shares a jihadist’s video. With alarming suddenness, he makes contact with her. What follows is an increasingly taut
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While the found-footage genre roared to life and eventually fizzled out across the late 90s and early 2010s, there’s recently been a resurgence of drama, thriller and horror films using innovative, non-traditional perspective. Feature films like
Searching,
Host and now
Profile make clever use of the familiar computer desktop, using desktop applications and cameras to tell stories in an exciting new way.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (
In the Skin of a Jihadist by French author Anna Erelle,
Profile follows struggling British journalist Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane), who goes undercover as a recent convert to Islam in the hopes of getting the scoop on a prominent ISIS recruiter (Shazad Latif).
‘Profile’ Film Review: Journalist Catfishes ISIS Fighter in Tense Online Thriller
Timur Bekmambetov’s portrait of a screen-to-screen relationship is timely, although it mostly scratches the surface
Carlos Aguilar | May 11, 2021 @ 5:00 PM
BEZELEVS/Focus
Expanding the digital-age subgenre of films entirely told on computer screens from the personal (“Searching”) and the supernatural (“Unfriended”) into the geopolitical, “Profile” is a tense on-camera thriller based on a real-life case dealing with international terrorism.
In 2014, French journalist Anna Erelle, using a fake identity, established a pretend romantic relationship with an ISIS jihadist via Skype. The objective was to learn about their tactics to recruit and transport young European women into Syria. Her hazardous ordeal is documented in the book “In the Skin of a Jihadist.”
SYNOPSIS:
An undercover British journalist infiltrates the online propaganda channels of the so-called Islamic State, only to be sucked in by her recruiter.
The first thing that sticks out about
Profile is that director Timur Bekmambetov’s screen-centric thriller uses the previous Facebook layout, which checks out as the film actually played some genre festivals starting as far back as 2018. However, the importance of studying and combating Internet radicalization of all kinds has only grown in urgency, meaning the film is already aging well.
Valene Kane is Amy, a British journalist hoping to acquire a staff position by impressing her chief editor Vick (Christine Adams) by going undercover online with Islamic extremists to extrapolate information on how they persuade young European women – sometimes teenagers – to give up their lives and traveled to Syria joining the cause. Naturally, if successful, this would be a huge article, albeit a dangerous endeavor. More intriguing