With an introductory note that reads, “This is a fictional story inspired by true events,” Skincare seems like it may provide a vague take on a sensational true crime story. Fortunately, despite its stranger-than-fiction premise, this thriller does have a handful of interesting ideas outside of the realm of true crime. Unfortunately, it also all but abandons those ideas in its messy third act, making for a mixed bag of a movie.

Elizabeth Banks stars as Hope Goldman, a facialist to the stars who’s moving on to the next step in her illustrious career with her own skincare line. When she and PR assistant Marine (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez) struggle to build hype around her brand, though, Hope finds it easier to blame new competition than fix her own company’s issues. Her wrath is reserved specifically for Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), the owner of a skincare studio that has just opened up across the street. He’s trendy, with neon signs and a newfangled anti-gravity body chamber, and that quickly begins to outshine Hope’s legacy of customer service.

But that’s not all that’s impacting Hope’s business—she starts getting creepy videos and calls from an unknown number, and her personal and professional lives are turned upside down when someone hacks her email and sends a deranged, disturbed message to her entire client list. Not long after, she finds herself stalked and sought after by men; someone, somehow has gotten a hold of her picture and information, and they’re using it to post sexual ads online. With the authorities being less than helpful, Hope turns to her new friend Jordan (Lewis Pullman), a life coach who vows to help her.

Skincare is strongest when its central mystery starts to ramp up and its story spotlights a uniquely female paranoia. It takes place in 2013, when sexual harassment was an unspoken norm and the murky depths of the internet were beginning to surface. Hope finds herself the object of male attention in her daily life, but that sense of surveillance intensifies tenfold once her body is advertised online. The despair that she feels over her hijacked image feels especially poignant now, at a time when women’s bodies are being objectified in terrifying ways via AI deepfakes; no matter the decade, the internet is as much a weapon as a tool. Banks’ portrayal of Hope’s shock, anger and anxiety is painfully relatable for any woman who has received and fretted over uninvited male attention—which is to say that Banks’ performance should resonate with all women.

The movie toys with more everyday sexism too, from police disregarding Hope’s worries over her obvious stalker to nearly every male acquaintance in Hope’s life expecting some sort of romantic favor from her. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but Skincare is largely effective at showing the toll that kind of sexist expectation and degradation takes on women.

Now, if only that subject matter stayed the main focus of the film, then Skincare would really be on to something. Instead, it takes a sharp turn into true-crime territory, hitting the beats of the news story that inspired it rather than building off of it. After sitting with Hope’s mounting paranoia in a contained, layered way, the movie tries to pick up momentum with her increasingly crazed theories about who has concocted this plot against her. It won’t take a particularly savvy viewer to guess who’s behind it all, and that poor handling of a plot twist makes it hard to latch onto the film’s rapidly escalating stakes. Things go a bit off the rails after Skincare’s big reveal, and while what happens is technically grounded in reality, it isn’t grounded in the story.

With that shift, the film’s final half hour feels decidedly devoid of creativity or insight. A lot of plot unfolds all at once, some of the characters react, and then it’s over. Hope’s arc ends in an especially odd way, finishing the movie with a manic, hysterical glint in her eye that clashes terribly with what just took place. It’s a bad way to finish an otherwise good movie, one that has some strong ideas but isn’t able to follow through on all of them.