Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (2022) (Fantastic Fest 2024)

Do you ever wonder about how people will remember you after you’re gone?

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (2022), is a film which is hard to discuss via conventional means – largely because it’s not a conventional film. The act of reviewing this mixtape is more akin to critiquing the life, personality and character of the person who is its central focus, than it is about tackling a regular documentary would.

For some context, Kati Kelli (also known as “Gunther”), was the filmmaker, video artist, and internet personality behind “Girl Internet Show” – an absurdist, experimental sketch comedy series uploaded on YouTube for a period of 5 years between 2013 and 2018. Unfortunately, Kelli suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in 2019 at a tragically young age, just three days after post-production had wrapped on her debut short film Total Body Removal Surgery. Five years later and Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is playing to an audience at Fantastic Fest as a celebration of a young talent who was lost too soon. The film collects together the vast majority of her YouTube skits in one feature-length programme, and closes with her final, posthumously-released short.

Curated by filmmaker Jordan Wippell and I Saw the TV Glow (2024), director Jane Schoenbrun, Girl Internet Show might not be the movie you’d expect, especially given the tragic circumstances that resulted in its creation. If you’re going to cry, they should be tears of laughter as the thing that will overwhelmingly stick with people is just how hilarious Kelli was – to the point that it largely overpowers the inherent melancholy of a piece like this. Deeply 2010s but also strangely ahead-of-her-time, Kelli’s manic, off-the-wall sense of humour and gloriously out-there use of hyper-feminine aesthetics perhaps shine even more now than they would have when these skits were first uploaded. Stylistically and tonally somewhere between Eric Fournier and Tim & Eric (not the same Eric), yet nonetheless wholly doing her own thing, it has been a fair while since I’ve laughed as hard as I did at some of the sketches in Girl Internet Show, my personal favourite being an advert for flavoured breast milk that immediately nosedives into a hyper-edited digital hell.

At times, Kelli almost seems to predict the future of internet culture, from the way in which dolls feature in her sketches (which makes me wonder what she would have thought of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon), to a brief line about her being “medically diagnosed as a brat” that speaks for itself in 2024. There are also several haunting moments where, in the midst of an otherwise funny bit, Kelli makes a joke that would unintentionally foreshadow her untimely death – most notably in a series of exaggerated ultra-moody comedy poems that end with her stating that she is, in fact, dead and gone. Though it’s an otherwise hilarious, high-concept, and well-crafted piece, it’s hard to watch Kelli’s Total Body Removal Surgery and not think of the unfortunate context surrounding its production, as it’s a short that’s quite literally centred around her absence .

Girl Internet Show may not have been directed by Jane Schoenbrun, but it nonetheless carries that air of melancholy and existentialism that can be found prominently throughout their filmography, and at times, I got the impression that Kelli’s videos may have been the real-world inspiration for parts of Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Occasionally, in the middle of an unbelievably funny sketch, Girl Internet Show made me pause and think about how I would be remembered if I also passed on unexpectedly. Perhaps it’s a grim and sobering notion, but as the film goes on it becomes harder and harder to ignore – particularly when a heart-breaking clip that wasn’t uploaded to YouTube shows Kelli lamenting that she hasn’t done anything with her life at 22 years old. Girl Internet Show demonstrates that Kelli had indeed done something with her life, and was a wonderfully creative and inspired person, whose work is now playing on the big screen at Fantastic Fest of all places. It’s bittersweet, sure, but it’s nonetheless a reminder that we don’t always see the positive impact that the things we do and make have on others, and that although Kati Kelli is sadly no longer be with us, Girl Internet Show is proof that she won’t be forgotten.

Girl Internet Show is clearly a deeply special, important piece of cinema, and it pains me to say that as its format as a mixtape is, in some ways, inherently a little flawed. This is no fault of Wippell or Schoenbrun as they’ve arranged the sketches with clear, effective purpose and intent, nor is it the fault of Kelli, whose skits are consistently funny, stylish and well-made. Girl Internet Show’s minor flaw as a film lies in the fact that Kelli’s work was quite simply never meant to be viewed like this as the videos that make up the feature-length runtime are short-form by design, and are best enjoyed in small doses for full effect.

As a whole, it’s a great showcase of Kelli’s talent and creativity, and this format definitely works best for a theatrical showing. As moving and carefully-curated as Girl Internet Show’s arrangement is though, you get the feeling that it works better as an introduction to Kati Kelli as a comedian and a filmmaker than it does as the “ideal” way to experience her filmography. With all that being said, I wholeheartedly recommend Girl Internet Show to all those who are interested (whether familiar with Kelli or not), simply for its beautiful, bittersweet, and singular existence.

In essence, Girl Internet Show is the real-world antithesis to the cursed, rage-filled tape from Koji Suzuki’s “Ring”. Each frame is filled with love, creative passion, and above all, a desire to share the work of a wonderful young woman who sadly left this world before it knew her name. Kelli ends one of her sketches with the comically desperate line, “don’t forget about me”, and we won’t Kati. We won’t.

Robyn’s Archive – Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape