Horse Girl follows Sarah, a lonely 20-something year old going through a mental breakdown. Through night terrors, Sarah never knows what’s real or what’s not. The audience - however -  knows exactly what’s going on. It’s pointed out very early in the movie that both her grandmother and mother suffered from a mental illness that Sarah clearly is lapsing into. So there’s no tension when we’re watching Sarah go from skeptical of anything wrong to a sudden jump of craziness faster than my finger clicking on the exit movie button on Netflix. Instead of investing the audience into the story, making you wonder if what Sarah is experiencing is actually true or not, like “Oooo maybe she did get abducted by aliens and is really a clone of her grandmother,” you know that it’s all in her head and feel no wonder, but a sense of pity for Sarah that overstays its welcome.

 

As if writing a bad first movie isn’t enough, there’s also a major controversy whether or not Horse Girl plagiarized from a 2017 indie flick called The God Inside My Ear. The director of that indie movie, Joe Badon, went to Facebook to air his grievances. Just to make his point, he also made a comparison video of the two films side-by-side.

 

Now, I haven’t seen The God Inside My Ear, so I’m not fully aware of the comparisons he’s making, but I have seen Horse Girl and lots of the examples he gives of plagiarism seem cherry picked. Things like: both girls hearing voices, both girls recently experienced loss of a loved one, both girls get transported to a dream room that’s just white, both girls have a nose and ear bleed respectively and go to see the doctor because of that (not to mention a whole list more of things similar to these). All these examples feel like common tropes in this genre of psychological mind-bending films. Of course some scenes will look and be shot the same. In his comparison video he highlighted that both films have the actress brushing her teeth and lying in bed. That’s not exactly plagiarism, just boring filmmaking we’ve seen time and time again. 

 

Okay, to be fair, some comparisons actually do make you raise an eyebrow, but there just isn’t enough to substantiate any claims of plagiarism. That’s a pretty hefty accusation to just be throwing around, especially in Hollywood. Let’s apply Occam’s razor, two films in the same genre just happened to have a couple coincidentally similar points. I mean, in the promotional run for Horse Girl, Alison Brie did say that her inspiration for the film was of her and her family’s history of mental illness. In all accounts she did seem pretty genuine about this story of hers, and it makes me sad that, in that light, Horse Girl feels like a very heartfelt story from Alison Brie. It kinda makes me feel crappy that the movie never really had any punch and flopped into obscurity.