Unfriended review

          One of the reasons I am continually interested in horror films, despite its poorly skewed attempt-to-success ratio, is that it’s a genre that's always encouraged to experiment and can do so in way that is fun and poppy. Sixteen years ago mainstream audiences were caught off guard by “The Blair Witch Project” because of its rough production and the then-untitled ‘found footage’ conceit. Today--five "Paranormal Activities" later--what was once considered risky and forward thinking now feels pretty standard and taken for granted. With“Unfriended,” director Levan Gabriadze takes an even more minimal approach in making a feature film that plays in real-time, entirely on an active computer screen.

        The majority of the movie is from the perspective of teenager Blair Lily (Shelley Hennig). As she clicks through her multiple browsers and computer aps, she soon joins a group Skype call with her high school boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) and a handful of other classmates (Matthew Bohrer, Courtney Halverson, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, Renee Olstead). They spend the first few minutes of their digital hangout discussing regular teenage gossip until a mysterious source, claiming to be an old friend of theirs named Laura who videoed her own suicide the year before. This source then begins to post embarrassing pictures to Facebook accounts, airing-out group secrets and systematically persuading the friends to casually off themselves.

       The set-up of a betrayed friend from the past coming back to haunt a group of narcissistic teenagers is nothing new to the genre but it's also something that doesn't have to feel old. In the internet age, where the past is literally never forgotten, now that everything always digitally documented, the film’s symbolism about old decisions coming back to haunt you later is undoubtedly relevant. Unfortunately these ideas play more incidentally than intentional and are never fully explored or mined in way that’s particularly scary.

       The idea to confine the entire film to the visible actions of a computer screen, never allowing for a cut-away or any other kind of cheat to open up the scene, is a lofty experimental goal and I commend Gabriadze for sticking to his guns and staying committed to the gimmick all the way through. To the film's credit, it’s surprising how much character definition we are able to access by viewing the way our protagonist frantically googles, fact-checks or chats, but this minimal POV also keeps us from really learning anything useful about the other characters that we're only seeing through the tiny windows of the movie's open Skype call. The performances by the mostly-unknown young cast are convincing enough but are these actors are given almost no breathing room to develop their characters beyond the base-reactions they have to sell to punctuate each plot point. What results is an 83 minute viewing experience that feels a lot longer than it is. 

                 As a horror movie it's not scary enough and every jump-scare is lazily provided by a sudden shriek or thud. Visually the movie fails to work as basic cinema. In fact, I’m not even sure if we can really call “Unfriended” a movie, in the most technical sense of the word. I suppose it uses a video element to tell a narrative but there’s no actual film language to speak of. A part of me appreciates this anti-aesthetic as something potentially interesting and modern, while another part of me thinks it’s reductive the point of formal disintegration. Regardless, the movie, if that’s what we choose to call it, isn't very good and its idiosyncratic presentation both overwhelms and undersells the story.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2015