Could it be that the found-footage market has become so over-saturated that the found-webcast is our newest horror conceit?
That appears to be the case in the new film Unfriended, directed by Leo Gabriadze from a script by Nelson Greaves. Premiering at Montreal's Fantasia Festival under the title Cybernatural where it was later picked up for distribution by Universal Pictures, the film uses Skype, Facebook and other social-networking staples to an innovative degree.
Presented primarily as a Skype call between a group of friends led by Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig), the film takes place one year after the anniversary of school bully Laura Barns' (Heather Sossaman) suicide, provoked by a public shaming video uploaded to YouTube. A mysterious caller has invaded the friends' video chat, and it soon becomes clear that the visitor didn't merely stop by to say hello but logged on with revenge in mind -- and for these teens, signing off has deadly consequences.
The film’s presentation has several tricks up its sleeve which are simultaneously clever yet exhausting to watch. In an attempt to memorialize Barns' still-active Facebook account and thereby rid her online spirit of its supernatural powers, Lily fills out a form on the site’s help pages. This leads to a chilling message (guess who it’s from) that replaces her original entries when she clicks away from the page and reopens it again. It’s an effective jolt, and the movie is good for several, but the tedium of watching someone fill out a form online makes one wonder if the “we’re watching someone else’s computer!” conceit is really as effective as we thought.
By the time we reach the movie’s centerpiece, a twisted game of “Never Have I Ever” (“like the drinking game?” a friend nervously asks in one of the film’s more memorable examples of wry, winking humor) orchestrated by Barns in which the loser must die, the film merely becomes an exercise in getting from one death to the next, complete with the surviving friends shouting and yelling about past events that we never truly connect to or care about.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing truly surprising about Unfriended save for its unique presentation. Take away the computer screen and you’ve got your average teen horror flick. It’s not so much that you’ll never want to Skype again, it’s more that you’ll probably never want to watch other people Skype again.
Unfriended hits theaters this Friday.