Movie Review: Unfriended
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Computers have become an integral part of our lives, but movies still haven’t come up with an interesting way of depicting their use. The character hunched over his or her laptop has replaced the character poking away at a typewriter as the dullest “action” that can happen in a movie. Writer 
Nelson Greaves and director Levan Gabriadze light upon an innovative, if obvious, solution to the problem in the cyber-horror flick Unfriended: their movie is one 80-minute shot of the protagonist’s computer screen. The computer is no longer just an aid to the plot; it is the medium through which not only the characters, but the audience, experience the plot.
Unfriended follows a group of high-school friends as they participate in a Skype chat over the course of a night. As far as horror archetypes are concerned, the gang’s all here. We’ve got Adam (Will Peltz), the alpha male; Ken (Jacob Wysocki), the stoner; and Jess (Renee Olstead), the slut. Then there’s Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), who’s in the habit of brandishing knives – in a sexy way – at his girlfriend Blaire (Shelley Hennig), through whose monitor we see this whole thing. This fun little hangout starts to go south when a mystery Skype user repeatedly shows up in the kids’ group chat, identifying itself as their former classmate Laura Barns, who committed suicide after an embarrassing video of her appeared online. Laura blames her former friends for bullying her into her decision and initiates a series of vengeful games in which, she threatens, logging off could be a matter of life and death.
This is all staged with a remarkable degree of realism. The young actors give convincing performances and they’re believable as a group of longtime friends shooting the breeze. The technology Blaire uses – YouTube, Facebook, iMessage, Spotify, et cetera – is up-to-the-minute, and the often hyperactive way she bounces between windows is true to life. The filmmakers create an interesting enough drama with a fair amount of tension by showing people interacting in a credible way online. But here’s the rub: Unfriended is a horror movie, not a drama, and it just isn’t that scary. The kids’ screaming and hysteria reaches a fever pitch at several briefly violent junctures, but the film has difficulty mining true terror from the static webcam shots of its five leads. There are some nice creepy brushstrokes – windows that have no “close” button, judicious use of video pixilation – but nothing truly frightening. The film’s most chilling bit – a pop-up ad incorporating previous footage of one of the characters – is a throwaway moment, there and then gone.
That memorably surreal moment works well enough to suggest that Unfriended’s low scare factor is due to the execution of its gimmick, not the gimmick itself. Laura may be a cyber-ghost of some sort, but for all intents and purposes she’s a traditional horror-movie serial killer, taunting her prey, invading their homes and then taking their lives. But it’s all done before five essentially stationary cameras, and that’s an awfully dull way to stage a slasher movie. Much as I hate to promote a glut of Unfriended copycats, I’d be interested to see a similar movie that really plays on the horror of our technology turned against us. Give me the horror of something unexpected and uncontrollable lying within the computer itself, behind every minimized window and downloaded file, rather than just at the end of a webcam connection to a friend who’s still in the real world.
Despite Unfriended’s shortcomings, it’s still unfair to call the whole thing a failure. While it’s hard to say the film’s gimmick works exceptionally well, it does at least work – and work well enough to hold the viewer’s attention for the film’s running time. And Unfriended’s creators certainly deserve some credit for that.
Patrick Dunn
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