Movie Review: 'Unfriended'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - When it was being shot, its working title was Offline.
When it first surfaced, its title was Cybernatural.
As of its current release, it's called Unfriended.
Whatever the official label, it's a supernatural horror thriller that explores our addiction to social media by employing the "found footage" conceit and aiming squarely, but not exclusively, at the teen audience.
Unfriended takes place in real time, exactly one year after the suicide, captured on YouTube, of a very popular high school student named Laura (Heather Sossaman), after she was ridiculed about an embarrassing video of her passed out at a party that someone posted.
On that occasion, six of her not-at-all-popular classmates treated her in especially mean-spirited ways: Blaire (Shelley Hennig), Val (Courtney Halverson), Jess (Renee Olstead), Adam (Will Peltz), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm).
It's on Blaire's desktop that the entire narrative plays out.
On the one-year anniversary of the suicide, the six classmates "gather" on Skype.
But, for some reason, there's a seventh person who logs on as well – on Laura's Skype account, no less – who would seem to be completely acquainted with last year's tragic events.
Is it Laura messaging Claire? How could that be?
Whoever this unknown interloper is, he or she or it threatens that any of the six who stops tracking or logs out will die.
And sure enough...
Russian director Levan Gabriadze (Lucky Trouble), working from a screenplay about digital revenge by first-timer Nelson Greaves, lets the tension level and dread quotient rise slowly but surely, but inserts a generous but not overwhelming number of obligatory shocks and sudden scares along the way.
Unfriended is timely in its consideration of social media, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and vicious videos, managing to include references not only to Skype and YouTube, but also Google Chat, Instagram, iChat, Facebook, Reddit, Spotify, and Chatroulette.
The gamble here was having the story unfold completely on a computer screen. But as contrived and gimmicky and self-conscious as that sounds, it actually plays, given the narrative, as appropriate and relatively efficient.
Our investment in these particular characters, dead or alive, as written and played is minimal at best, which keeps this one- or two-dimensional cautionary tale from being the emotional experience it might have been. And anyone not at least tolerant of horror-flick conventions will be quickly disenfranchised.
But it is nonetheless an easy-to-relate-to nightmare that just might creep into our thoughts and disturb us the next few times we log on.
To anything.
So we'll Skype 2½ stars out of 4. It's not for everybody, but as teen techno-chillers go, Unfriended is unusual and unsettling.
