March 13--The gut-grinding documentary "Beware the Slenderman" from director Irene Taylor Brodsky breaks down the Waukesha, Wis., case of Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser. Their delusional online lives and devotion to the viral fictional sensation known as Slenderman went horribly off-line in 2014 when the 12-year-olds stabbed a friend 19 times, leaving her for dead.
The third girl lived. The documentary deals with a tangle of issues involving mental illness and the role played by omnivorous technology, and the online universe's hold on the imaginations of millions upon millions of kids, in all sorts of childhoods.
I watched this one with a particular blend of dread, guilt and parental self-doubt. The most sobering minute of Brodsky's documentary is a simple, familiar mash-up of YouTube scare videos favored by the girls in the film, but grimly typical of those consumed by a huge all-ages audience who know Slenderman and his bloody exploits as well as their parents might know "A Nightmare on Elm Street."
It's hard not to experience "Beware the Slenderman" without thinking back on the endless row of look-the-other-way digital oversight mistakes you've made as a parent. It's that kind of true-life horror story.
In any case, this problematic but arresting film was peculiarly well suited to a berth at SXSW, where so much of the festival continuing through March 19 gets eaten up by talk of digital platform building, and people staring at their iPhones instead of interacting with humans. At SXSW there's a full complement of panels regarding online harassment and the darker, colder side of our technological preoccupations. But even President Obama mentioned the pitfalls in Friday's SXSW keynote event. Advocating for online access and availability, he also noted "how much of our lives are digitalized," and our tendency now toward "fetishizing our phones above every other value."
In "Beware the Slenderman" we see anguished parents wondering if they did enough, if they socialized their troubled kids enough, if they got in between their children and their devices enough. The movie tries too hard, in the end, to scare us every second, with a truly lousy and manipulative musical score, and visual techniques that work overtime to keep us nervous in hackneyed ways. The material's gripping enough on its own. The judicial story of the girls' fates is not yet finished. "Beware the Slenderman" is scheduled to air on HBO sometime later this year.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
