Unfriended

This was a very cool idea to do and can be potentially scary. However, the execution is absolutely awful. There's a lot of unexplained details and plot holes weirdly enough and it bugged me. Many things were mediocre and done pretty stupid. I will give credit when it's due however, it gave unintentional laughs with being so bad at some points and the deaths were a little satisfying. However, we don't know enough about the characters to care. The details that are noticed are more than baffling. This all around had some potential and it was thrown away, this was a legitimately cool idea but it's just not utilized. 5/10.

Oh lord . . . how long till Avengers? Unfriended is unwatchable, a product of towering dullness wrapped in a gimmick that doesn't work, packed with people you wouldn't want to spend five minutes with. It's a colossal miscalculation of character and tension built on a flimsy idea and padded out by technological glitches that don't build tension so much as get on your nerves.

I admit, the ad campaign had me sort of intrigued – I looks like a new idea – a Skype horror movie. Well, I can say I've never seen that idea played out before. Actually, it's the same dreck I've seen over and over, it's just another found footage movie broken up into six screens so that we watch six people having a video conversation, and die one by one.

I had hope, maybe because my senses within the genre have been recently (and temporarily) altered for the better. Having been dazzled by the freshness and skill of the recent It Follows, I walked into Unfriended with something resembling a hopeful heart. That earlier film, about a girl who is given a curse by her boyfriend after having sex with him in his car was a welcomed drink of water in a genre that is mostly an arid desert. Watching Unfriended is like having a mouthful of sand.

It goes something like this: Recently, a party girl named Laura went out got drunk, passed out and defecated in her pants. A fellow party goer took a video of her humiliation and posted it on the internet from which came a volley of cyber-bullying so severe that she ended up committing suicide.

The entire movie is made up of six screens that make up a six-party video chat. Our main character (I think) is Blaire (Shelley Hennig), talking with her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm) and four friends: Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob wysocki), Adam (Will Peltz), and eventually Val (Courtney Halverson). Also online is a mysterious presence that goes by the name billie227. No one can identify this stranger and all attempts to rid themselves of the unwelcome visitor come to nothing.

What follows is a textbook of every single manner of irritating your audience that you can imagine. From buffering to incessant typing to screen blips and flashes. billie227 plays games with their sanity and with their honesty by posting humiliating videos of cheating, and other bits of truth telling that break down their trust in each other. Much of this movie, you should know, is made up of people screaming before they meet a horrible (not to mention ridiculous) end – one guy is seen briefly with his hand in a whirring blender.

The gimmick might not be so bad if the participants weren't all screaming, self-centered bores. None of these people are worth spending time with. None of them have any real personality and when they die you really don't miss them. Then the movie comes to a baffling, nonsensical ending, a jump-scare that pulls the rug out from other whatever ground has been gained the past 80 minutes.

Unfriended is a depressing experience made by people who don't seem to have any real idea of what movies are suppose to be about. It is a movie made by committee, from people who concoct movies by gimmicks and commercial plugs, not by any sense of entertainment or giving the audience any kind of real experience. It's a hammered together project that seems based on what's popular at the moment. This is rank cynicism of the worst kind.

If you must see a horror movie this week, go see It Follows. That movie has style and a sense of characters, and a plot we care about. Sure, it's ridiculous and silly, but you come away feeling as if you've seen something new. Unfriended is the kind of movie that just ruins the rest of your day.

...or maybe the villain is Sheldon Cooper gone evil...Because you couldn't do the kinds of things that the villain does in this film unless you have all kinds of coding skills and superuser privileges. But I digress.

It was actually pretty interesting to me.A lot of people complain about it not being scary or containing the essence of a horror film, and I think that's kind of the point. The cliches of horror are there to throw you off the scent - the real horror comes from these kids and the depths of violence and cruelty that they show themselves to be capable of. They experience horror in the form of a ghost haunting them as they skype and chat online, but any violence that goes on is nothing compared to what they do to each other as they're forced to reveal their own and each other's secrets.

That alone, to me, makes it worth watching seriously. And the film has a "gimmick" that demonstrates a command of realism that returns to the fundamental idea of the verite style, after so many hackneyed "found footage" films made that term meaningless. The same is true for the dialogue - it's not good, because it's realistic. The characters do dumb things because it's realistic. And anyway, the idea of characters doing dumb things is a staple of horror films and makes for good writing. Characters making smart choices does not a good horror film make.

I'd recommend it.

This film is certainly a breath fresh air in its genre. The execution is very unique for a full movie but even it you disregard that, it can stand on its feet as one of those "small group of people stuck together and they have talk to figure things out" sort of dramas. On the other hand if you expect a serious horror, you might be disappointed. This is about creating tension by exposing secrets at a figurative gunpoint. Not about scary supernatural things or jump scares. In other words the horror is in the theme, not the presentation. If that's what you are after it's as interesting and surprisingly satisfying story.

In terms of technique, the film is presented as Blaire's computer screen and this allows for the kind of multiple media (Skype, YouTube, Facebook, etc) storytelling that's usually limited to alternate reality games. It enables the characters to communicate each other privately which would be impossible if they were physically in the same room. It also means that every time someone is in trouble the helplessness of the others adds to the drama. Not all is perfect though. There are some cringey parts related to the scene, like Ken's anti-Trojan program looked about as authentic as the virus uploader from Independence Day and when you consider that Laura is not really a hacker it makes zero sense to find hundreds of infected files on a damn OSX! The question "what is a troll" and the answers were equally embarrassing in this day and age. The corrupted video compression that plagued the Skype calls served little purpose. It signified nothing and it was way too random. Usually effects like this exist to telegraph some "presence", but here the corruption started way too early. Another downside is that the cinematography was even more non-existent than with the usual found footage films, because it's face-time all the time.

They used an interesting technique to bring in music which is usually absent from found footage: Blaire has a Spotify player running in the background. Unfortunately this excellent idea was way underused and when it was used it was very on-the-nose. If you've ever watched an ARG like EveryMan Hybrid, where (distorted) music is used to communicate subtext or hidden messages you know what a missed opportunity this is!

Overall it's worth a shot. If you only watch films you might even find this ground breaking. But let me assure you - there is nothing here that hasn't been thoroughly explored by various web series you can find freely. Sadly this movie is another instance of old media trying to play catch-up with new media and not quite getting it.

Or "Unknown User" as it is being called in Germany. Before you come up with things like innovative and never seen before, let me refer to something called "Open Windows" (which by comparison might feel like a masterpiece and it isn't either). That's just one example there are others too (The Den to name another which is also slightly better than this).

That doesn't mean you can't have "fun" with this movie too. It's just that it feels weird to say the least. I still was curious to see where it would go, but at times it felt like watching someone type ... which it sort of is too (literally at points). Also teenager drama can be annoying, characters swing their moods more often than a pendulum and the "twist" is so mad, that it almost destroys the whole movie ... A shame for some more than interesting points the movie has.