Movie review: Unfriended - digital dread

The unsettling horror film Unfriended is cleverly set in the broadband era

In a world where one’s worth is gauged, increasingly, by the number of friends, followers, likes, re-tweets, subscriptions and responses to online actions, ‘unfriending’ is no trivial matter. It has deep emotional, cognitive, social and societal consequences. The title Unfriended leads one to expect a film that deals with these consequences along with the many manifestations, costs and effects of the phenomenon of unfriending. Thankfully, Unfriended is a different film. It is not a screed about the ills and effects of technology and social networking but an entertaining and enjoyable film about ordinary people dealing with crimes of their past in a hyper-connected world.

Unfriended takes place in real-time over a period of 80 minutes. The action is limited to what is seen on the computer screen of high schooler Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) who chats with friends on Skype, while listening to music on Spotify, watching videos on YouTube and sending instant messages to her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm). The film opens with Blaire chatting on Skype with her boyfriend and as the lovers start talking naughty, they get added to a group call with other close friends. The group of teens is in the mood for a long idle chat but they keep getting interrupted by a mysterious online intruder. The intruder may be the ghost of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), a friend who killed herself after being relentlessly harassed and humiliated online. Each one of the friends is responsible, in part, for Laura’s death. It is the one-year anniversary of the suicide, and Laura’s ghost, it seems, is back for revenge. The teenagers try hard but are unable to get rid of its initially menacing and eventually lethal presence.

Unfriended does not chart any new territory. It is essentially the familiar and age-old story of irresponsible teenagers being forced, by supernatural forces, to pay for past cruelty and crimes. Yet, this works remarkably well in director Levan Gabriadze’s taut and disciplined horror film.

Three factors make Unfriended a success. One, the movie completely immerses viewers in the online experience. Two, the ghost has a personality and a sense of humour. And, three, fear is generated not through violence and carnage but from horrors abundant in the cyber world.

Gabriadze’s idea of setting the entire film on the screen of a computer is both novel and clever. Viewers, familiar with the world of multiple windows and multi-tasking, are likely to identify with the protagonist and get absorbed in the action as they watch it unfold on her MacBook. The film’s primary characters are seen only through their webcams, often simultaneously in Skype’s group video call, in an ingenious manner that pays rich dividends. Lost connections, pixelation, crackling, noise, poor focus, inadequate lighting and awkward camera angles are all used effectively to heighten tension and to create an atmosphere of fear, panic and terror.

The intruder — or the ghost of the dead Laura Barnes — has both a sense of purpose and of humour. It wants to enjoy itself and have fun as it determinedly exacts revenge. The ghost lures the teens into a perverse game which gets deeply hurtful and cruel as the film progresses. It enjoys exploiting the friends’ insecurities, secrets and infidelities to make them miserable and to turn them against each other. In one of the film’s funniest moments, the ghost changes the song on Spotify to Connie Conway’s How You Lie, Lie, Lie after gleefully revealing Lily’s sexual perfidies.

The film, surprisingly and thankfully, has very little blood and butchery. Instead, the entire arsenal of cyber bullying — anonymous messages, menacing posts, painful insults, malicious rumours, cruel heckling and much else — is used to create true and identifiable panic, horror and fear. Unfriended succeeds because it understands what very few horror films do — blood and gore can shock but real terror lies hidden in the everyday and the mundane. It is this terror that the film exploits and invokes successfully.



Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 10^th, 2015.