New Year, New You (2018): Manifest Your Best Self, Murder Your Worst Friends

New Year’s resolutions are usually things like drink more water, save money, stop doomscrolling at 2 a.m.

In New Year, New You, the plan is more ambitious.

Confront the girl who ruined your life. Force a confession. Accidentally create a murder house. Maybe steal her career afterward.

Self-improvement is a journey.

New Year, Same Old Trauma

The movie opens by giving us pieces of the ending before we understand any of them: a body floating in a swimming pool, a girl screaming for help, and someone going through a window.

The movie then cuts to an online lifestyle show introducing Danielle Williams, a wellness guru whose personality appears to have been focus-grouped by a ring light. She sells vegetable juice, positivity, manifestations, and the idea that a bad life merely requires the correct sentence repeated into a camera.

The camera pulls back to reveal a little girl watching Danielle beside her babysitter, Alexis, who has a distinctive scar along her jaw. The child is obsessed.

Alexis is very much not.

The girl excitedly explains that Danielle is her idol and wants to know what she was like when Alexis knew her in high school. Alexis reveals that the two used to be friends and did theater together. Then the kid asks if Alexis stopped acting because of the scar along her jaw.

Alexis says no. She left acting because she wanted to do something better with her life.

The child responds by asking why she is a babysitter.

Children really are nature’s smallest performance reviewers.

Later, Alexis arrives at her family’s large, mostly empty house to prepare for a New Year’s Eve reunion with old high-school friends. Her parents are selling the place, and she has not been back in years.

Almost immediately, the movie treats ordinary household objects like suspects in a police lineup. The breaker box, golf clubs, and kitchen knives all receive long, ominous close-ups. Talon eventually wondered if the breaker box was the killer.

To be fair, it gets more screen presence than some characters.

Four Old Friends and Several Unresolved Issues

Kayla and Chloe arrive first.

They are clearly still close. Chloe is loud, funny, obsessed with money, and fascinated by a pair of $5,000 boots. Kayla responds like someone who understands that shoes should not require financing.

The three women reminisce, but something uncomfortable sits underneath it. Chloe says the house still feels strange after what happened there years ago.

Then Danielle arrives.

Everything is amazing.

The house is amazing. The balloons are amazing. Everyone looks amazing. Existing within a twelve-foot radius of Danielle is apparently an amazing experience.

She slips into influencer mode even when nobody is watching, smiling so relentlessly that Talon became distracted by how little her jaw seemed to move when she spoke.

Alexis, meanwhile, looks like she would rather be undergoing dental surgery.

Before dinner, the movie shows how frayed Alexis already is. While Danielle lectures everyone in the kitchen about being dairy-free and living well, Alexis chops a cucumber with all the concentration of someone mentally leaving her own body. Talon spends the scene waiting for the knife to hit a finger.

It does.

Alexis retreats to the bathroom, bandages herself, stares into the mirror, and suddenly punches it hard enough to crack the glass.

Her parents are trying to sell this house.

Between the broken mirror and the future murder scene, the resale value is becoming theoretical.

At dinner, Danielle suggests everyone share something they are proud of.

Kayla talks sincerely about helping people through her work. Chloe jokes that she has no boyfriend, no money, a sick mother, and at least did not kill herself this year. Alexis admits that a mental-health crisis interrupted college but hopes her biggest accomplishments are still ahead.

Danielle responds with exactly the kind of polished encouragement you would expect from a human inspirational mug.

Danielle never shares what she is proud of. Everyone else gets emotionally strip-searched, but the woman who suggested the activity avoids taking a turn.

That feels about right.

Danielle later starts filming everyone’s resolutions. Kayla and Chloe play along, but Alexis repeatedly refuses. Danielle keeps pushing until Alexis flings her phone across the room. Dan found her refusal to respect that boundary more infuriating than almost anything else she does.

Later, they revisit an old dance routine to TLC’s “Unpretty,” a painfully appropriate choice for Danielle’s wellness persona and Alexis’s insecurity about her scar.

For a little while, they almost look like friends again.

It does not last.

Never Have I Ever Waterboarded an Influencer With Champagne

The mood changes during a game of Never Have I Ever.

It begins with normal embarrassing stories. Then Chloe pushes Danielle to admit she hooked up with an extremely wealthy man associated with electric cars. Danielle tries to dodge the details. Alexis does not let her.

Her irritation keeps building until she finally turns the game in another direction.

Never have I ever bullied an innocent girl until she killed herself.

The room freezes.

The girl was Kelsey, another member of their high-school circle, and her death is the event hanging over the entire reunion.

Danielle tries to deflect.

Alexis explodes.

She knocks Danielle to the floor, pours champagne over her face, demands that she admit what she did to Kelsey, and counts down to midnight while everyone else watches.

Happy New Year.

Then Alexis tells Kayla and Chloe to tie Danielle up.

And that is when we discover this was never really a reunion.

The three women planned the evening together.

Their goal was to trap Danielle, frighten her into admitting that she bullied Kelsey, record the confession, and destroy the career she built around wellness, empowerment, and becoming your best self.

Alexis also lays out the damage Danielle did to the rest of them. Chloe’s weight was targeted so relentlessly that she developed bulimia. Kayla was mocked for being a lesbian before she was ready to come out. Alexis admits that she joined in too, but says Danielle had the same power over her then that she now has over her online followers.

Danielle’s response is astonishingly efficient.

She turns the attempted confession into content.

On camera, she admits only that Kelsey was bullied and that she wishes she had done more to stop it. She presents herself as another imperfect teenager carrying regret.

Thanks for the opportunity to heal.

Alexis is furious.

Talon was too.

Camera Ready Means Lipstick, Clay, and a Piece of Broken Mirror

Once Danielle refuses to confess, Alexis starts unraveling.

She covers Danielle’s face with a green beauty mask, smears lipstick around her mouth, destroys her makeup, and announces that she is getting her “camera ready.”

Danielle barely reacts, which makes Alexis even angrier. It is the same struggle for control Dan hated during the resolution video, only now it has mutated into something uglier.

Then Alexis uses a shard from a broken mirror to hack off a chunk of Danielle’s hair.

Kayla has had enough. She retreats to the bathroom and calls her girlfriend, Frankie, who offers to pick her up. Kayla insists she can make it through the night and see her tomorrow.

Alexis follows her, and Kayla reminds her that this was supposed to be intimidation, not torture. Their plan was to scare Danielle into admitting what happened.

Alexis insists they simply need to push harder.

Meanwhile, Danielle identifies the weakest part of the conspiracy.

Chloe.

All it takes is an apology for calling Chloe fat in high school and one carefully selected promise.

Danielle tells her that once her career moves fully into television, she will need someone to take over part of her online brand. Chloe could have the audience, the money, Los Angeles, the life she has always wanted.

And Chloe folds with impressive speed.

Kayla may be questioning whether they have gone too far.

Chloe is already mentally pricing the $5,000 boots.

She unties Danielle.

When Alexis returns, she presses the mirror shard against Danielle’s jaw, directly over the spot matching her own scar. Danielle calmly tells her that Kelsey, not Danielle, gave her that scar. The movie never clearly explains how; it only connects the injury to Kelsey’s final night.

Then Danielle attacks Alexis, knocks her unconscious, and takes control of the house.

Nothing Stands Between Me and All My Desires

Alexis wakes up locked inside the sauna with Kayla.

Danielle and Chloe have wedged pool cues through the doors, trapping them inside as the temperature climbs.

This is where Kayla becomes the closest thing the movie has to a functioning moral center.

She tells Alexis the truth. Danielle was horrible, and what happened to Kelsey mattered. But Kayla has a life now and a girlfriend she loves. Danielle being famous does not require them to keep reliving high school forever. Unfollow her. Go outside. Get a dog. Do literally anything else.

It is probably the healthiest advice anyone gives in a movie built almost entirely from weaponized self-help language.

Outside the sauna, Danielle is busy converting Chloe.

She has Chloe repeat a manifestation:

Nothing stands between me and all of my desires.

Then Danielle calmly explains that they can leave Alexis and Kayla in the sauna long enough to die and tell police it was an accident.

Chloe is alarmed.

For approximately thirty seconds.

Danielle reframes the problem. What if Alexis and Kayla expose them? What if they ruin Chloe’s future? What if everything Chloe wants disappears because she was too afraid to claim it?

Nothing stands between me and all of my desires.

Kayla smashes one of the sauna’s small windows with a champagne bottle, allowing them to escape just as Danielle and Chloe rush toward the room carrying knives.

The reunion has officially become a corporate retreat hosted by Charles Manson.

Chloe Manifests Several Felonies

After finding the front door locked and failing to force open the garage, Alexis and Kayla retreat upstairs and hide in a closet.

We continue to object to closets as an emergency survival strategy. If the killer finds you, congratulations, you have selected your own storage container.

Alexis leaves to find a phone while Kayla stays behind. Chloe discovers her.

Kayla tries to reason with her. They can stop. They can call the police. Kayla even offers to protect Chloe and blame Danielle for what happened.

Chloe refuses.

She does not want to return to her normal life.

During the struggle, Chloe shoves Kayla. Kayla hits her head against the bathroom counter and dies.

As Dan immediately noticed, the movie has now successfully killed the Black character first.

Good to know some horror traditions survived the wellness revolution.

Chloe is horrified by what she has done.

Danielle congratulates her.

She tells Chloe she is proud of her for finally putting herself first and not allowing anything to stand in the way of the future she deserves.

At this point Danielle could probably watch someone drive a school bus into a volcano and find a way to call it growth.

Then Frankie arrives looking for Kayla.

Danielle instantly creates another plan: kill Frankie and blame the entire massacre on her. They will say Frankie became jealous after Danielle encouraged Kayla to leave their supposedly toxic relationship.

Chloe, who recently seemed disturbed by accidental murder, stabs Frankie to death with startling commitment.

Manifestation works fast.

New Year, New Influencer

Alexis now understands that nobody is leaving peacefully.

She arms herself with one of the golf clubs the movie practically introduced with its own spotlight earlier.

Finally.

The golf club has fulfilled its destiny.

When Danielle and Chloe come upstairs, Alexis swings.

She misses Danielle and connects with Chloe instead, sending her down the stairs and killing her.

Now only Alexis and Danielle remain.

Their final fight becomes less about Kelsey and more about what both women actually resent.

Alexis tells Danielle she ruined her life.

Danielle tells Alexis she is nothing. She is invisible. She will never have Danielle’s success, money, audience, or power.

And suddenly Danielle no longer sounds like a wellness guru trying to heal from her imperfect past.

She sounds exactly like the high-school bully Alexis has been describing all night.

The fight ends at the reinforced upstairs window.

Years earlier, Kelsey went through that same window and fell into the pool below. The movie has been returning to fragments of that death all night.

This time Danielle is the one against the glass.

Alexis overpowers her and shoves her through.

Danielle lands dead in the pool, recreating the image that opened the movie.

Alexis survives.

And then she makes the most important decision of the night.

She steals Danielle’s ending.

Later, Alexis appears on the same cheery online program that featured Danielle at the beginning. The official story blames Frankie for the massacre, using the jealous-lover narrative Danielle invented before her death.

Alexis tearfully praises her wonderful late friend.

Then the sadness disappears.

The smile comes on.

The voice changes.

And Alexis immediately pivots into a bubbly self-defense demonstration teaching viewers how to make homemade pepper spray.

New year.

New her.

Same bullshit.

The Verdict

Neither of us loved New Year, New You, although Talon found more to enjoy in it than Dan did.

Dan gives it 4 cents out of 10.

His biggest problem is that almost nobody is redeemable. Kayla comes closest because she recognizes that the revenge plan has gone too far and has a meaningful life outside high-school trauma. Danielle is infuriating, Chloe switches sides with supernatural ease, and Alexis becomes as ugly as the person she wants to expose.

Dan especially disliked Danielle’s constant boundary-pushing and fake motivational persona. The fact that she can turn every act of cruelty into empowerment language only makes her more unbearable.

Talon gives it 5 cents out of 10.

On the first watch, she could treat it as a dumb, mildly fun thriller with exaggerated characters. On the second, its shallowness, slow stretches, and obvious foreshadowing bothered her more.

She did think that shallowness was partly the point.

The movie is taking aim at influencer culture, manufactured authenticity, obsession with status, and the way self-help language can become another tool for narcissism. Danielle is obviously performing a version of herself for the internet.

The final joke is that Alexis spends the entire movie hating her for it.

Then the moment Danielle is dead, Alexis puts on the same smile and takes the job.

So perhaps New Year, New You does contain one genuinely effective wellness lesson:

Be careful who you manifest yourself into.