clickbait movie review

"Clickbait" is a reminder of why Netflix series became such hits in the first place. A cast of recognizable, serviceable actors dive with melodrama and zeal into a narrative that defies logical sense but moves at a breakneck pace, ends on cliffhangers like clockwork, and incorporates just enough zigs and zags to keep viewers guessing. The miniseries' title is accurate enough: "Clickbait" grabs you, whizzes you along, and leaves you feeling satisfied before you forget everything you just watched. It's not sophisticated, but it is highly bingeable, and its eight episodes are consistently outlandish enough to keep you watching.

The miniseries from Australian creators Tony Ayres (whose name you may recognize as being affiliated with another buzzy, goofy show called "The Slap") and Christian White follows a family caught up in a bizarre, only-of-this-moment mystery. Husband, father, brother, and son Nick Brewer ( Adrian Grenier ) appears one day in a viral video, holding a series of signs that say "I ABUSE WOMEN" and "AT 5 MILLION VIEWS, I DIE." The video burns through the Internet, amassing thousands of clicks in minutes, taking over news networks, and becoming the only one thing anyone is watching on their phones, tablets, computers, or TVs.

Who is Nick Brewer? "Clickbait" attacks that question from two different angles. First consideration goes to Nick's family: his shocked and enraged sister Pia ( Zoe Kazan ) and mother Andrea ( Elizabeth Alexander ), and his numb and confused wife Sophie ( Betty Gabriel ) and their two sons Ethan ( Camaron Engels ) and Kai ( Jaylin Fletcher ). The Brewers live in a small Oakland community where everyone seems to know everyone, and soon what is happening to Nick takes over their lives. Sophie's schoolteacher colleagues whisper after her; Ethan and Kai's classmates turn on them; and reporters camp out outside their house. And the question no one can answer is: Why would this happen to Nick? Or, on the flip side: What did Nick do to make this happen?

The spontaneous, impulsive Pia, whom Kazan permeates with jittery energy, refuses to stand aside and wait for the police to do their jobs. "This video is not a confession. It's a death threat," she says, and she turns to hacker friend Vince (Jack Walton) to look into Nick's online life and help her investigate on her own. Her other ally is Detective Roshan Amiri ( Phoenix Raei ), a missing persons detective desperate to prove himself and earn a promotion into homicide. As they pursue a number of leads—was Nick seen somewhere; where were the videos of him filmed; did he disappear on the way to work?—they tumble down a rabbit hole that suggests Nick wasn't the loving family man he seemed to be. One dating app profile appears, then another, and another. With Nick abducted and unable to speak for himself, it's up to his family members and the others involved in his case to try and piece together who Nick really was.

Each of the eight episodes of "Clickbait" focuses on a different character, with episode titles like "The Sister," " The Detective ," and "The Wife." First up is Pia, who takes everything personally and who feels guilty about her last interaction with Nick. Next is Sophie, who has a secret of her own and is trying to hold the family together. Later on are Ethan and Kai, who fear the worst but whose lives spent entirely on social media give them a different, nearly symbiotic, relationship with what is happening to their father. And Roshan and journalist Ben Park ( Abraham Lim ), who see in this case an opportunity to advance their careers, also get their own standalone episodes—and their choices serve as a commentary on the very "clickbait" nature of the show's content.

That shift in perspective per installment isn't so drastic that the "truth" of events changes from person to person, and that restraint is the right choice. "Clickbait" is already so reliant on jarring narrative reveals (often complemented by Kazan's stricken, mouth-agape face) that experimenting with subjectivity vs. objectivity would have been too much. Instead, each focused chapter allows a peek into characters' interior lives. The actors grab onto those opportunities and sprint forward, and the series benefits from their lack of artifice.

Kazan is the series' anchor as the brash Pia, all contemptuous energy, guilty glares, and stomping strides, and she sparks well against Gabriel's Sophie, who is more contained and constrained. "Clickbait" attempts to make a point about how the white Pia can be hysterical in a way that the Black Sophie can't, and although the series doesn't take the idea quite far enough, at least it raises it. The same nod of acknowledgment applies to Roshan's homelife, which includes his family speaking Persian and Roshan's time praying at a mosque. It's depressingly rare in Hollywood for an actor of Iranian descent to play a character of Iranian descent who isn't a terrorist, and Raei has the right kind of bearing to fall into fairly handsome, slightly smarmy cop roles. Is there a "Law and Order" spinoff that needs a new detective? Raei could work!

Do any of these performances indicate murky depths or hidden layers? Not really. Whether in the present time period or in flashbacks, the writing doesn't allow for a ton of tangibly built backstory, and there are a few scenes sprinkled throughout (especially in the fourth episode) that play a bit too much with the "real" world vs. the persona we cultivate online. And some characters feel underwritten, in particular Ethan and Kai, who the series treats more as inconveniences than legitimate narrative concerns.

For the most part, though, the ensemble's work feels urgent and in the moment, and that matters for a series like this. Ultimately, "Clickbait" doesn't say anything singular about the anonymity of the Internet, and it flirts with a lot of big ideas it doesn't pursue as vigorously as it could have: how the community of chat rooms and message boards can lead to insularity and paranoia; the disposability of hookup culture and the way toxic masculinity can manifest within it; and the aforementioned difference in how the media treats people of different races. But a show that went down those roads wouldn't have been "Clickbait," and also probably wouldn't have been this silly or low-brow entertaining.   

Entire series screened for review. "Clickbait" hits Netflix on August 25. 

Roxana Hadadi

Roxana Hadadi is a film, television, and pop culture critic. She holds an MA in literature and lives outside Baltimore, Maryland.

• Adrian Grenier as Nick Brewer
• Zoe Kazan as Pia Brewer
• Betty Gabriel as Sophie Brewer
• Phoenix Raei as Roshan Amir
• Abraham Lim as Ben Park
• Camaron Engels as Ethan Brewer
• Jaylin Fletcher as Kai Brewer
• Brad Anderson
• Cherie Nowlan
• Emma Freeman
• Bradford Winters
• Christian White
• Melissa Scrivner-Love
• Pete McTighe
• Cornel Wilczek

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• Marden Dean
• Mark Wareham
• Rodrigo Balart

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Clickbait’ On Netflix, Where A Man Goes Viral For Being Kidnapped And His Sister And Wife Try To Find Him

Where to stream:.

• Stream It Or Skip It

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Naming your show  Clickbait invites all sorts of comparisons to actual clickbait, and that’s definitely not a great thing. People hate clickbait, with its misleading headlines and pictures. So inviting comparisons to the thing that people who use the internet (i.e. everybody) hate the most puts the show at a disadvantage. So, is  Clickbait the narrative equivalent of its namesake?

CLICKBAIT : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A family dinner celebrating the senior member’s birthday. A cake is brought in. Everyone looks happy except the woman sitting at the end of the table.

The Gist: For some reason, Pia Brewer (Zoe Kazan) sees the “group present” given to her mother Andrea (Elizabeth Alexander) by her brother Nick (Adrian Grenier) and his wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel), she starts going off. She more or less says that Nick is controlled by Sophie, which leads Nick to lose his stuff and demand that she “take your shit and get out!”. Zoe decides to go clubbing and get stinking drunk.

As she’s sitting in the club bathroom, she’s swiping on a dating app and responds to someone named “Woody.” Right as she gets up, she drops the phone in the toilet. She rushes home, puts the phone in a container of her roommate’s rice and passes out.

Pia goes to work the next day as a nurse, and one of her teen patients, Vince (Jack Walton), shows her a viral video of a beat-up man holding a sign that says “I ABUSE WOMEN”, then another one that says, “AT 5 MILLLION VIEWS I DIE.” Pia is shocked to see that the man holding the sign is Nick.

She has a hard time believing Nick would do what he says on the sign or run afoul of someone that would threaten to kill him. The two of them are very close, and his job — a physical therapist at a local college — doesn’t put him in harm’s way. She finds out from his work buddy Matt Aldin (Ian Meadows) that he was supposed to be in an early meeting, but he never showed up.

She goes to Nick’s house to join Sophie and her nephews Kai (Jaylin Fletcher) and Ethan (Camaron Engels), and the two women decide to go to the police, as the view count starts moving into the hundreds of thousands. Roshan Amir (Phoenix Raei), a detective in Missing Persons, takes the case and says he’ll look into who’s hosting the video and see if it can get taken down. But as the video spreads around, the hit count increases even faster.

A second video pops up, where Nick holds a sign saying “I KILLED A WOMAN”, but in different writing that’s not his. Det. Amir pairs up with a homicide detective, Zach De Luca (Steve Mouzakis), but neither of them can get the video taken down, since it’s hosted overseas. One thing that De Luca wonders is what that sign means. Pia tells off both cops and she and Sophie storm out.

Vince promises Pia that he and his buddies on a Reddit-style board will help scour the video for clues, and one clue actually leads the cops to the van where the video was made. But by this time, the original video has vaulted past 5 million views.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Clickbait  has the piecemeal feel of a mystery thriller like  Who Killed Sara?

Our Take: The “clickbait” conceit for  Clickbait  more or less lasts one episode. Why? Because by the time the episode is over, the video that Nick is in is already over 5 million views. The only suspense at that point is whether Nick is going to survive or not, and it doesn’t take long to figure that out.

After that’s pushed out of the way. the series, created by Tony Ayres and Christian White, becomes a pretty standard whodunit/whydunit show, with elements of people with secret lives and things not being what they seem thrown into the mix.

As the case progresses, the perspective shifts: In the second episode, for instance, we see Det. Amir deal with Det. De Luca’s mistrust, see him interact with his family, and find out that he and Pia had an interaction before the case brought them together. The third episode concentrates on Sophie, and so on. At some point, we even get perspective from Nick’s older son Ethan.

Shifting those perspectives while telling a cohesive story isn’t easy to do, and so far, Ayers and White are able to tell the story even while the center shifts from character to character. How long they’ll be able to do that as things get more complex is anyone’s guess.

The heart of the show, though, is Kazan, and we generally like where she takes Pia. She is playing her emotions right on the surface, which is a good contrast to how Gabriel plays Sophie, a woman who wants people to take their shoes off indoors and use coasters, even as she is desperate to find Nick. But since we’re not sure where the anger she displays at the beginning of the episode comes from, and that it gets rechanneled into her anger at the cops for questioning her and Sophie while Nick is missing, makes us wonder if her story is being unnecessarily piecemealed out to the viewers.

Grenier is fine, but he’s more of a peripheral piece, given that we’ll see him mostly in flashback. The rest of the cast also works well. It’s just that we’re not sure if the story in  Clickbait is interesting enough to follow, especially when it’s unnaturally larded down with tech fakery (if someone can explain what “geonicking” is, we’re all ears) for no other reason to keep the online connection when it’s not necessary.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Pia and Matt go with Det. Amir when the truck is found. She stands by as a SWAT team opens the truck. Is Nick in there?

Sleeper Star: Raei does yeoman’s work as Det. Amir; diving into his life in the second episode seems unnecessary on the surface, but that’s through no fault of his. We actually spend most of that episode rooting for him.

Most Pilot-y Line: We have no idea why there’s a second video, other than as a plot contrivance so the cops can take the case more seriously. Also, we know Vince is a teenager, but even teenagers have the sense to not lunge and make a pass at the thirty-something Pia while she’s trying to look for her friggin’ brother.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s something about  Clickbait that seems a bit off, whether it’s the flat plot or the concentration on characters that are less than interesting. But Kazan puts in a magnetic performance, and that may be more than enough to keep viewers watching through a mystery that stumbles out of the gate, weighed down by technological nonsense.

Will you stream or skip the mystery thriller #Clickbait on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) August 26, 2021

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream  Clickbait On Netflix

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Adrian grenier and zoe kazan in netflix’s ‘clickbait’: tv review.

In this thriller miniseries a seemingly respectable family man is kidnapped and forced to appear in a viral video admitting to abusive behavior, claiming he'll die if it reaches 5 million hits.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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If nothing else, give credit to Clickbait for a perfectly apt title. Like the genre of internet article it’s named after, the Netflix miniseries tries to lure in audiences with the promise of juicy reveals and hot-button controversy — only to deliver, in the end, a shallow story about not much at all.

Creators Tony Ayres and Christian White do begin with an interesting premise. Nick Brewer ( Adrian Grenier ), a seemingly kind and decent family man, disappears one morning on his way to work. Hours later, a mysterious video clip surfaces in which Nick admits, apparently under duress, to abusing women — and then indicates that he himself will be killed once the video reaches 5 million views.

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Airdate: Wednesday, Aug. 25

Cast: Adrian Grenier, Zoe Kazan, Betty Gabriel, Phoenix Raei, Jessica Collins, Abraham Lim, Daniel Henshall, Camaron Engels, Jaylin Fletcher, Ian Meadows, Becca Lish, Motell Foster

Creators: Tony Ayres, Christian White

Could Nick really be guilty of the crimes he’s confessed to? If he is, does the punishment fit the crime? If he’s not, who’s framing him, and why? Can Nick’s family stop the video from reaching 5 million views? What does it say about the internet’s dark id that some people seem downright eager to see Nick torn apart? How complicit are all of us in a situation like this, one that requires the indifference or active participation of millions of total strangers?

Clickbait tries to address those questions, and many more that arise along the way, over eight episodes of 45-ish minutes, each of which focuses on a different individual connected to the case: Nick’s hot-headed sister, Pia ( Zoe Kazan ); his devoted wife, Sophie (Betty Gabriel); Roshan (Phoenix Raei), the ambitious detective assigned to the case; Ben (Abraham Lim), the ruthless journalist pursuing the story,  and so on. The structure theoretically allows for a more comprehensive view of not only the mystery and the people involved in it, but of the digital culture it’s steeped in.

But the show’s problems start with the fact that, well, it’s doing this over eight 45-ish-minute episodes. The ultimate reveal of what’s really going on isn’t actually all that complicated or all that shocking; Clickbait has simply decided to take six hours to solve a mystery that a feature film (or Black Mirror episode) could wrap up in a fraction of the time. After a couple of episodes of incremental reveals and obvious red herrings, the temptation to just skip the rest and search for spoilers on Twitter becomes overpowering.

Meanwhile, Clickbait offers precious little of the rich characterization or world-building that justifies the long hours spent on other TV mysteries, like Big Little Lies or Mare of Easttown . Everyone in Clickbait has secrets, but that’s not the same as having personality or interiority. Few of the characters ever manage to transcend the archetypes they begin as, and some become grating in their repetition. (Kazan throws herself into Pia’s ragged desperation, but I too grew sick of “the whole goddamn Pia show,” as another character puts it.) The rare exception is Sophie, which is more a feat of acting than writing. Though the character’s lines are as generic as anyone else’s, Gabriel allows us into the intense emotions roiling beneath her fragile calm as she struggles to absorb every devastating new twist in her husband’s ordeal.

Still, this blandness could perhaps be excused if Clickbait had at least something insightful to say on the topic of the internet, which is ostensibly its core thematic concern. But here, too, it stumbles. The series relies on references to #MeToo, doxing and catfishing to add a sheen of relevance, but its exploration of those topics goes about as deep as an Urban Dictionary entry. The choice to avoid real companies (the characters use “subports” instead of subreddits, for example) isn’t an insurmountable challenge to its credibility in and of itself — but combined with Clickbait ‘s arm’s-length approach to the issues it purports to investigate, it only adds to the sense that the series has no idea what it’s talking about.

It’s not that all Clickbait ‘s arguments are invalid. It is true that laws governing the internet can be tough to enforce across borders; that the Terms & Conditions we mindlessly click on can open us up to privacy nightmares; that the eager new friends we meet online may not be who they claim to be; that in spite of those pitfalls, the internet can be a useful tool for investigation or connection. But these points aren’t new. They’ve been made by countless other series and films — everything from Black Mirror  to The Circle  —  on levels far more complicated and nuanced (and entertaining) than seem within Clickbait ‘s capacity to imagine.

What we’re left with, then, is a whole lot of nothing. Clickbait isn’t brainy enough to add to the already ongoing conversations around the dangers of the internet, and yet it’s not brazen enough to lean into full-on pearl-clutching. It’s not so incompetent as to be dismissed as total trash, but nor is it interesting enough to embrace as a hidden gem. It’s just kind of there, waiting for someone to find its title provocative enough to give it a click. You’d do best to heed the warning built into that same title, and keep on scrolling.

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Clickbait Reviews

Clickbait is a fun take on social media, fame, and what best friends are ready to do for each other when the moment comes, giving satire, dark humor, and style to a story that is fun and keeps the viewer on their toes throughout the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 4, 2020

The references the film reaches for are plain to see and the message certainly not lost, but it's definitely been done before in a much tighter way.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2019

A scathing observation of the habits of the internet age, Clickbait asks us to take a hard look at our online viewing habits and the true reasons for our enjoyment of the darker things that appeal to us.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 29, 2018

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When family man Nick Brewer is abducted in a crime with a sinister online twist, those closest to him race to uncover who is behind it and why. When family man Nick Brewer is abducted in a crime with a sinister online twist, those closest to him race to uncover who is behind it and why. When family man Nick Brewer is abducted in a crime with a sinister online twist, those closest to him race to uncover who is behind it and why.

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‘Clickbait’ Makes Basic Points About the Internet Forcefully: TV Review

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

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In a premise that seems borrowed from “Black Mirror,” Adrian Grenier’s Nick Brewer appears in a startling web video near the start of Netflix ’s “ Clickbait ,” holding a sign indicating that once his taped confession of abuse gets 5 million views, he will die. The clip, of course, goes viral. And unsure where he is, his family must figure out how a man they only knew as devoted and sweet found himself confessing to a secret life.

That family does the heavy lifting on this limited series. With each episode devoted to the point of view of a different character, the installments focused on Nick’s sister, Pia (Zoe Kazan), and his wife, Sophie (Betty Gabriel), are the strongest. Both existed in the shadow of Nick’s goodness — Pia as black-sheep sibling, Sophie as less devoted spouse — and each seems dazed as she confronts the new reality the web has opened up in their lives.

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Unfortunately, “Clickbait” comments much more effectively on character than on society. A journalist played by Abraham Lim, constantly breaking the law to ensure he gets scoops about the Brewer scandal, exists as living proof that the media is engaged in a race to ethical rock bottom. This story has been told elsewhere, and with more acidity and irony. What rankles most about Lim’s plotline isn’t that tales like these paint the practice of reporting with a broad brush (although that’s true, too). It’s that “Clickbait” pats itself on the back for observing that tabloid-style media coverage can have collateral damage.

Popular on Variety

That gets at the general misguidedness of a very watchable show that ultimately runs aground when trying to assert big ideas. Some of the characters are drawn and performed effectively. But after starting in an extreme place, the show keeps pushing further past credibility, cutting corners on its investigation subplot in favor of increasingly bizarre demonstrations of the internet’s dark power. All the wilder flourishes are in service of the rudimentary idea that no one knows us online; the series goes to strange places in continuing to make the case, with which it’s hard to disagree anyhow. “Clickbait” seems to be forcefully arguing after the viewer’s conceded: Yes, the internet has made anonymous misbehavior much easier. But is there eight hours’ worth of story here? Or just endless amplification of that basic fact?

Perhaps this is where “Black Mirror” has the right idea: Its vignettes of life online range in quality and in novelty, but none runs longer than a feature film. By the end of “Clickbait,” which has taken much time and used many talented people to state the obvious, viewers may themselves feel they were baited by a show with a grabby title and synopsis, one that spoke loudly but had little, in the end, to say.

“Clickbait” premieres on Netflix on Aug. 25.

Netflix. Eight episodes (all screened for review).

• Production: Executive producers: Tony Ayres, Christian White, Brad Anderson, David Heyman, Tom Winchester.
• Cast: Adrian Grenier, Zoe Kazan, Betty Gabriel

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