Netflix's recently released Clickbait is a character-based psychological thriller that unfolds in eight episodes, narrating the story from the perspective of the show's characters while keeping the storyline moving.
As a diehard fan of psychological thrillers, I was hoping to get that adrenaline-pumping rush from entering the minds of the movie's morally ambiguous characters as the director evokes moods of confusion, anxiety and even fury. Very much like the characters, I desired to struggle to discover what was really going on.
My hopes to experience the aforementioned were quickly dashed midway into binge-watching the series, which attempts to showcase the treacherous world of social media deception.
For one, it falls flat in its efforts to lure viewers with assurances of juicy reveals and pulsating controversies, delivering rather a half-baked narrative about not much at all.
The limited miniseries could have used the revolving points of view format more compellingly, given it is supposed to be a high-stakes thriller that investigates how peoples' most dangerous and uncontrolled impulses are enticed in the age of social media, exposing the ever-present cracks we observe between our virtual and real-life personas.
Viewers are drawn in with this gripping premise as we see family man Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) kidnapped, beaten and forced to hold up cards for an internet video clip that acknowledges that he has abused and killed a woman. As if that wasn't a startling enough revelation, it ends with an eyebrow-raising: "At 5 million views I die."
From there, we see Nick's wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel), his sister Pia (Zoe Kazan) and his sons work with law enforcement to do anything in a race against the clock in their attempt to track down who made the video and Nick's whereabouts.
Throughout the entire hodgepodge of events that ensues, the family grapples with what the video suggests. This raises a number of questions on whether the man they knew and loved was indeed an abuser. Possibly even a killer?
While Clickbait begins by wooing the viewer with some compelling thought exercises, it is quickly knocked down by its paper-thin and relatively unimpressive characters. The eight episodes concentrate on the sister, the detective, the wife, the mistress, the reporter, the brother, the son and finally the answer. A conclusion that once again fell short, making viewers feel as if scriptwriters in a last-ditch attempt decided to pull an idea out of thin air to conclude an already exhaustive effort to make sense of the entire story.
Unfortunately, none of the episodes are interesting enough to redeem the series other flaws, other than an episode that deals with an associate television producer who goes to any lengths to grab a story and is able to use cheaply bought data off apps to assist in cracking open a pivotal element of the case.
Interestingly enough the investigation feature of Clickbait isn't all that bad at the start, but it could have easily been distilled into a single episode of a show such as FBI: Cyber Crimes, and many more in this genre.
Unfortunately, in between investigating the crime, so much of Clickbait is spent in a lifeless attempt to focus on its characters, who give the audience little in terms of substance.
So it doesn't come as much of a surprise that despite binge-watching eight episodes, I still found I knew little about any of them. Frankly they never really seemed to be worth knowing much about anyway!
While the issues covered in Clickbait such as abduction, murder, betrayal, catfishing, anger, revenge and more all make for a nail-biting thriller flick, the execution of it on all levels was a total disappointment, making it an easily forgettable series.
- Clickbait
- Starring Zoe Kazan, Betty Gabriel, Phoenix Raei
- Created by Tony Ayres, Christian White
- Now streaming on Netflix
