After found footage and phone footage films, here, with the inevitability of a man in belted jeans launching a new iPhone model to a crowd of saucer-eyed disciples, is the first ever selfie movie – a naive and self-indulgent piece with very little going for it other than zeitgeist bragging rights.
Shot mostly on camera phones by the actors, #Starvecrow is a tiny-budget British drama about a group of insufferably privileged twentysomething mates. Ben Willens is Ben, a controlling narcissist who creepily films everything on his phone. When his on-off girlfriend (Ashlie Walker) walks out for good, he steals her friends’ mobiles – giving the film its footage of attention-seeking drunken antics and nastier behaviour never intended for Snapchat. Ben, like one of the lads from Made in Chelsea after inadvertently catching an episode of The Moral Maze on Radio 4, tells his psychotherapist that he wants to see “between the cracks” of people’s lives.
The whole thing is an endurance test of amateurish improv and muddled plotting, with some pseudo-arty cutaways thrown in. No doubt the film-makers are sincere in wanting to say something about the digital age, toxic masculinity and the harmful impact of hypersexualising young women. But #Starvecrow left me feeling bored and annoyed.
