Movie review: Sex, lies and status updates in ‘Unfriended’

A found-footage thriller in the vein of “Paranormal Activity” and “Open Windows”, “Unfriended” scales the concept down and brings it closer to home, eschewing handheld cameras and voyeuristic CCTV footage in favor of presenting the film completely through the social media windows and browser tabs on the protagonist’s computer screen.

The story concerns our point-of-view character, Blaire (Shelley Hennig, of TV’s “Teen Wolf”), who is receiving private Facebook messages from Laura Barns, a classmate who took her life the previous year following online and public abuse stemming from the posting of an embarrassing drunken video. As it turns out, Blaire and Laura were close in their younger years, but drifted apart when they got to high school.

While our heroine Googles the ramifications of answering messages from the dead, an unidentified person barges in on a Skype video session (ahh, the wonders of broadband that actually does what it’s supposed to) between Blaire and her friends. What begins with the stranger turning the teenagers against each other through sadistic mind games and sharing their secrets online soon escalates into a deadly game of "Never Have I Ever", with the stakes being nothing less than the players’ lives.

As a horror flick about a scorned high schooler wreaking supernatural vengeance on those who wronged her, there’s not much that is new here – much less the idea of someone making people play for their lives – but one has to appreciate director Levan Gabriadze’s commitment to the high-concept premise he’s working off of.

Presenting the entire film through a multi-connected point of view immediately familiar to anyone under the age of thirty, “Unfriended” applies a decidedly 21st century take on the notion that the most effective horror is that which takes the familiar and twists it into something terrifying.

Bringing to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s famous statement that “drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves keep the action moving by using every trick in the book to hew the real-time, first-person format closer to one resembling that of a traditional film: Internet hiccups and glitches take the place of the time dilation and constriction editors used to generate suspense, while slow buffering times and mysterious off-screen sound effects allow for the usual array of jump scares (it was the cat!).

For the most part, the narrative juggling act works, with overall tension maintained almost throughout, though viewers unused to multitasking or carrying out multiple online conversations simultaneously may find themselves a bit disoriented (if not nauseated) jumping from Google to YouTube to Skype to Gmail to Facebook to Spotify and back – often at the same time. While Blaire never once uses a keyboard shortcut (the audience wouldn’t be able to follow her actions if she did), and only manages one typo in the film’s entire running time, the filmmakers are smart enough to allow us glimpses into her head via considered responses that eventually get rewritten before being sent.

Funnily enough, for all the effort put into the onscreen presentation of the film, one has to wonder how the filmmakers got it into their heads that a group chat with five teenagers could ever manage to keep quiet whenever Blaire (and, by extension, the audience) needs to switch to another window. How very considerate of them.

The same, of course, cannot be said of Laura’s tormentors, who get what’s coming to them in a variety of appropriately (implied) gruesome ways. Considering the rather convoluted manner in which our spirit of vengeance chooses to go about her acts of retribution, can anyone really blame the poor dead girl? After all, as one character grimly points out, Laura had more friends and followers on her social media profiles following her death than she ever did before it.

There’s a lot to be said about the difference between friendships cultivated in real life, versus those accumulated online, and while the definitive thesis on the topic isn’t going to come from a teenage horror flick, it does give “Unfriended” enough of an emotional through line that the film succeeds long after the novelty of its gimmicks has faded. — BM, GMA News

"Unfriended" is now showing in Metro Manila cinemas.