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 
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.
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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