THE LAST BEAUTIFUL GIRL

A teen’s identity becomes entangled with social media fame when she moves to a remote mansion with a troubling history in this thriller.

Sixteen-year-old Isabella is crestfallen to leave her Brooklyn home for a small town in Massachusetts when her parents take positions at a college that includes lodging in an ornate old house that was inhabited by Isabella Granger, an artist’s model and muse from the early 1900s. An aspiring actor, Isabella is naturally disappointed to not only be leaving her best friend, Eve, but that Eve will assume her starring role in the school’s production. However, her initial feelings of foreboding about the eerie house give way to appreciation and more after her new friend, Alexa, convinces her to allow her to photograph and post images of Isabella in the house dressed in clothing and jewelry left behind by Granger that the two girls discover in a hidden storage room. Divided into four parts and riffing heavily on The Picture of Dorian Gray, this mashup of spiritual possession and obsessive social media attention-seeking creates an air of discomfit that is lengthily sustained by creepy but obvious jump scares involving mirrors, shadowy figures, and unexplored rooms. It’s familiar territory and wraps up with quite a few loose ends, though the exploration of the psychological allure of going viral is interesting. All main characters read as White.

Atmospheric but predictable; one for die-hard fans of haunted-house stories.