I’m a fan of horror movies and I love it when a horror movie brings something new and interesting to the table. There are a lot of horror movies that just want to stick to the status quo and not take any chances. I’m talking to all you filmmakers who think it’s a great idea to make yet another Poltergeist ripoff which seems to be the popular trend these days. The filmmakers behind Paranormal Activity took a chance on filming their movie very cheaply and different and it paid off big time for them. Sure the Paranormal Activity franchise is repetitive just like any other horror movie franchise, but they came up with a gimmick that works and I’ve enjoyed every single one of the those movies to at least some degree. So here we have Unfriended, the movie that completely takes place on a teenage girl’s laptop computer screen. When I first heard about this movie I thought it sounded ridiculous and gimmicky although fortunately the filmmakers are somewhat able to make the gimmick work.
Unfriended is about a group of teenage friends who knew a girl named Laura Barns who committed suicide a year earlier after an embarrassing video of her was uploaded to the internet. The movie starts out with a girl named Blaire (Shelley Hennig) chatting on Skype with her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm). After a while their friends join the Skype call and they are just hanging out when all of a sudden they notice another person on the call who has no picture. Blaire checks the person’s profile and realizes that it is Laura Barns’ profile. Some odd stuff starts to go down as the person who has hacked into their Skype call starts to terrorize the six friends.
The first thing you should probably understand about this movie is that it is basically a slasher movie shot in a very different way. This movie has been getting a lot of hype and praise lately, but I think it is important to know that people like me went in with low expectations and thankfully came out the other side having seen a mostly decent horror movie that was based on cyberbullying. Part of me feels as though this movie was just made to pander towards millennial teenagers. Although I am a millennial I’m not exactly the target age group considering I graduated high school in 2007 back when Myspace was still more popular than Facebook. Sure there is a lot of product placement and this movie was very much made more teenagers, but overall I’m okay with that because I know most teens will enjoy it as much if not more than I did which is obviously the goal of the film.
The movie being shot completely on a computer screen is interesting because the filmmakers use everything on the screen through the internet to tell the story and to add an interesting style to the look of the movie. All the background music is done through Blaire’s Spotify account and the popular website LiveLeak is used to show Laura Barns’ suicide. One effective way they use the computer screen shot format is in how Blaire types iMessages to her boyfriend Mitch. It shows her emotional state without showing her face by having her start to type something and then pause and then delete what she was about to send to Mitch. It’s nothing too genius although I thought it was a very clever way to show the character’s emotional state.
I have a few mixed feelings on this movie. On one hand I like that the filmmakers were able to come up with a new and interesting way to film a horror movie in a way we haven’t seen before. On the other hand though it isn’t a movie that is going revitalize the horror genre as a whole and I get the feeling that with a little more work the movie could have come off a bit better. The story is passable, but it is very thin and it doesn’t feel like we get enough time to get to know the characters. Despite the disconnect I had with the characters the young cast does a great job and have to be given credit especially for the fact that they are basically all acting in front of a computer screen for the entire movie. They all come off very natural and believable.
I had a little problem with the idea of why the six friends couldn’t just turn off their computers. The movie kind of explains it by having the person who hacked into their Skype call threaten them with death if they close down Skype. I know teenagers are obsessed with technology, but I don’t completely buy that a regular teenager would just stay online. It was just a small pet peeve I had but it wasn’t big enough to ruin the rest of the movie for me. Throughout the movie there are actually quite a few comedic parts that were legitimately funny and worked just as well as the scares. The mostly teenage crowd I watched the movie with pretty much ate everything up and reacted to every jump scare. Overall I can’t say that this movie was great and for the most part it is a pretty predictable slasher movie, but it does what it sets out to do with a gimmick that put a lot of restrictions on the filmmakers. I would have liked a bit more characters and story development, but I was mostly satisfied with what I watched.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★(3) out of ★★★★★(5)
