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Unfriended


Unfriended




Director: Levan Gabriadze

Writer: Nelson Greaves

Cast: Heather Sossaman, Matthrew Bohrer, Courtney Halverson, Shelley Henning, Moses Storm, Will Peltz, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki

Unfriended is a movie you've seen, with a new gimmick. On the anniversary of the suicide of an acquaintance (it's not really clear how much interaction most of them had with her beforehand) six friends meet on a Skype call. And that's the gimmick; all interaction (aside from some phone calls) takes places on some form of online social network. Skype, Facebook, Chat Roulette, Youtube (by the way, apparently Youtube thinks plating food is somehow related to a suicide video), etc. I can't wait to watch this movie with some teen in a decade or two. "Hey, hey, what the hell are these?".

Aside from dating the movie, is there anything obnoxious about the gimmick? Well, there are a few bumps. Some have to do with logic, like fact that the characters could have very easily ignored the problems in the beginning but don't for some reason. Some things are shown working in ways they just don't, like a Google search's first result being something that blatantly had nothing to do with the search. Some things just completely kill the mood, like them using common internet acronyms ("She finally STFU!"), and either it's a coincidence or they actually put memes in the dialogue.

With that said, the problems aren't particularly movie breaking, most of them are fairly minor things. That's not to say the gimmick actually works well, because it doesn't. It could have worked well, if the movie wasn't so completely intent on hammering into your head "YES! GHOSTS! IT IS A GHOST!". If it hadn't done that, it could have made for an interesting movie that kept you guessing on the culprit since you can't really see what anyone's doing. Doing it that way probably would have required less gory deaths or none at all, though, and there was no way this movie was doing something like that. So instead you get the typical "Killed off one by one" plot.

It can keep your attention, if nothing else. Despite the rather limiting gimmick, it doesn't really become boring at any point, with the exception of a beginning that consists of "Who's this guy on Skype? Let's keep trying to get rid of it. It is vitally important we video chat right now for some reason!". There's at least some entertainment to be had figuring out who'll die next.

Said deaths are the closest the movie gets to scary (aside from one effective shock moment), and they aren't really scary, just gross. Points for creativity for some of them, but that's all they get. And watching the characters die feels like ticks on a little counter, "Kay, three down, we gotta be halfway through the movie". It's kind of hard to figure out if the movie wants us to care about them or not; it seems to follows the common "jerk victim" routine, which of course opens up the problem of why we should care if the movie thinks they deserved it. If the movie did want us to feel bad for them, it kind of failed. There's not really any impact from their deaths, probably because most of them don't get much characterization. At best, the movie manages to squeeze out one moment of pity for one of the characters.

It should be noted that apparently the ghost is an amateur sound designer who thinks certain dramatic moments of the film would be better underscored by stupid, unfitting music from the main girl's computer. It's probably supposed to be her taunting them. It just wrecks the scenes.

Unfriended is better than most probably expected, but it's not as good as it could have been. It's a slasher movie online, and the novelty of that is all it really has going for it.



Bit of a warning; do not go into this movie if you have vision problems. Lots of fairly small print, most of it plot related.