Movie Review: Unfriended

Unfriended
Directed by Leo Gabriadze
In Theatres

But first, a confession.

I’ve enjoyed some found footage films. Cloverfield, Chronicle, The Blair Witch Project, Quarantine. I enjoyed the heck out of them. There are issues with them, of course – why does the guy in Cloverfield rarely put the camera down? Hell, why is he carrying a camera around while death, destruction and mayhem surround him on all sides? In Blair Witch why doesn’t whomever is holding the camera when the map is lost hit the guy that lost the map in the head with the camera? Why do the guys in Chronicle insist on documenting their superpowers? Okay, now that I think about it, if I suddenly got superpowers I would probably take at least an iPhone with me when I went flying. Anyway, my point, if I can find one, is that found footage films have an inherent problem with their very premise: why are the characters documenting their lives to this degree? Is it vanity? Is it a really such a good idea to burden yourself with having to hold your hands up in front of your face while on the run from unspeakable horror? But if these characters didn’t take the effort to make their escape cumbersome we wouldn’t have found footage films to enjoy. The suspension of disbelief serves us well.

Which brings us to Unfriended.

Unfriended adds a twist to the found footage genre. The entire film is told on a high school girl’s laptop screen, in real time. Which, when I see it written like that, black lettering on a stark white background on my laptop while Primal Scream plays on Spotify, looks like something that should be as mind-numbingly dumb as that haunted cell phone movie that Kristen Bell starred in years ago. Why didn’t they just turn their cell phones off? You know, if your cell phone is haunted you could get another less haunted phone? I don’t think most phone contracts cover hauntings, but you never know if you don’t ask. Damn, that was a dumb, dumb idea for a film.

Unfriended avoids the dumbness of the haunted cell phone movie by setting the rules of its movie universe early. In Unfriended’s movie universe, angry ghosts can possess the people the ghost is angry with and force them to kill themselves in some horrific and disturbingly creative ways. The angry ghosts can also mess around with email and Facebook and Skype and Spotify playlists and the internet in general. They will share your secret betrayals and force you to confess to the things you’d rather not ever think about. And they never, ever make empty threats.

The ghost in Unfriended is out for revenge. And the revenge plays out in real time during the film. A group of friends are on Skype, their webcams capturing the group’s annoyance at a mysterious interloper, their attempts to dump the interloper from their conversation, their growing terror and fear as the ghost extracts its vengeance. And their anger as each dark betrayal is brought out into the light. The set-up is very effective, the tension grows organically from the situation. The young cast completely sells every aspect of this movie, the friendships, the petty jealousies, and the horror. Unfriended was filmed in a series of very long takes, some of them the entire length of the film, in some very small spaces, some of the actors on screen for nearly all of the running time. That is some very heavy lifting for experienced, more tenured actors. The fact that this young group pulls it off should be a point of pride for this cast and should be acknowledged.

Where the film fails, for me, is the use of real world situations of abuse and the responses to that abuse that ended, for some, in suicide. Teens taking their lives because of sexual predators or bullying or abuse or harassment is a tragedy and we shouldn’t just be telling them it gets better, we should be making it better. The film includes a scene that is quite obviously “inspired” by a young girl’s famous response to online harassment, by a video she posted just before she ended her very short life. The intention may have been to shock the audience with a call to something that was in the news in the last couple of years. But it just comes off as exploitive and cheap. This girl deserves more than to be a scene in a horror film. Her name is Amanda Todd and she deserves more respect than that.

Horror has always been more about what is happening in the world at large than what is happening on screen. Filmmakers take the concerns of the culture at large and twist and tweak them into the stuff that goes bump in the night on celluloid. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a treatise on the growing conformity of 1950s America. The Exorcist is more about the dissolution of the old family unit and the birth of a new paradigm. Saw speaks to video games, Cabin In The Woods is a conversation about who really is in charge as the world seems to become more and more chaotic. And Unfriended is about the question that more and more of us are asking: who is watching while I’m online? Who is taking note of my search history? Who is recording my texts, my emails, my chats? Who is making a note of my playlists, my Facebook posts, my tweets, the Tumblr accounts I visit? What used to be the unfounded paranoia is now an accepted part of our daily lives. The notion of online privacy seems to be completely foreign to an entire of generation that will share nearly everything with the world at large. Unfriended is just about one of the best examples on film of our online lives at this point in the twenty first century.

Is Unfriended worth your time and money? The premise is fresh, the acting is fine, the reactions real. It does devolve at times into just a bunch of faces, each in its own frame on the screen, screaming obscenities. And I did spend parts of the movie trying to will the girl who owns the laptop we’re watching to click on the tab that said 'Johnny Cash'. I really want to know what that was about. Hopefully someone clicks on that tab in the sequel.