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Unfriended
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| Year: |
2014
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Director: |
Levan Gabriadze
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| Stars: |
Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Will Peltz, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki, Matthew Bohrer, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman, Mickey River, Cal Barnes, Christa Hartsock
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| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Blaire (Shelley Hennig) is spending her evening before a big test online, chatting with her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) over Skype. When he calls her up at first, she tells him she has something he would like to see and points her webcam at her bare feet, but he is in on the gag and asks her to direct it higher up her body, so she shows him her legs instead. As a joke, he produces a carving knife and shows it to Blaire as a fake threat to take off her clothes and give him an eyeful, but as she is unbuttoning her blouse their other friends appear on the screen and nearly see too much, they think it’s pretty funny but Blaire wonders how they were able to connect without her permission – Mitch doesn’t know either…
The issue of cyberbullying was a pertinent one around the time Unfriended was released, which likely contributed to its sleeper hit status, surprising for many observers since it almost exclusively, until the last few seconds, took the form of Blair’s laptop screen and everything she could see there over the course of eighty minutes. It was similar to the Elijah Wood horror Open Windows in that respect, yet that film had gone to absurd lengths to keep up its gimmick, whereas the teens in this were stuck more or less in their bedrooms for the entirety of their scenes, and was more effective as a result, or at least more serious in its message, for there was a message here. That was, to put it blatantly, to think before you posted something on the internet.
Blaire and her friends have somehow been connected to the suicide of a classmate called Laura (Heather Sossaman) which our heroine has been watching a clip of as the film begins – she shot herself on school premises and this was captured on someone’s phone. The ethics of uploading something like that to the net are not glossed over in the least, indeed we are intended to be questioning them all the way through as there was another clip of Laura taken at a party before her death where she got blind drunk and soiled herself. Naturally with the complete lack of privacy technology allows in the twenty-first century, this has been widely viewed, and that is, it’s implied, what drove the girl to end her life.
But there’s more to it, as it seems there was a systematic campaign of bullying against her which, on being reminded of the date of the events of the film the characters are of the opinion that she was badly behaved herself, as if that justified her untimely death. She may not have been perfect, but Nelson Greaves’ script asks us if that were a criteria for suicide there would be nobody left in the world for everyone would have suffered a terrible instance of self-realisation and topped themselves from shame. But as that has not happened, what is it that provokes the pile on, especially on the internet, of the self-righteous demanding the punishment of those they believe deserved the punishment they were only too happy to mete out themselves, and from behind the screen where it seems less personal?
Of course, the actual suicide statistics speak to the hounding of certain victims to their premature deaths being very personal indeed, and that impulse to self-destruction was a real problem in a society where too many were itching to leap on the outrage bandwagon irrespective of whether they have ever made a mistake themselves or not – there but for the grace of God go I never occurs to them, or if it does it’s a form of pre-emptive strike lest they be the target. All heavy stuff, and deftly woven into Unfriended, which was slightly harmed by the fact the cast were all in their late twenties and plainly not teenagers, but the sincerity was genuine. That they chose to update the slasher format for the cyberspace era was one that looked obvious in hindsight, but was handled with a compulsive quality proving with perhaps a degree of hypocrisy that we viewers were anticipating the deaths of the bullies in the same way the bullies anticipated the death of their victims. Or was that simply self-awareness? It was a horror movie, after all, and certain conventions must be adhered to. Whatever, it provided food for thought.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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