Are we living in an interesting era for horror movies, or is there currently just a glut of them? It Follows was playing in the same multiplex as Unfriended, which itself was preceded by trailers for The Gallows, Insidious 3, The Visit and the Poltergeist remake, one or other of which was advertised as being “from the producers of The Purge and The Grudge”. My optimistic half (okay, third) warms to the thought of teens nationwide leaping screaming into the laps of their zit-stippled dates all summer long; my pessimistic half just keeps thinking about that glut.
Unfriended comes on like the last gasp of the found-footage boomlet of the last few years, as the genre finally exhausts itself just in time for the 20th-anniversary re-release of The Blair Witch Project, which was ultimately to blame for the whole sorry phenomenon in the first place. We’ve had Paranormal Activity 1-4, V/H/S/ and V/H/S/2, Insidious whatever it is now, and the occasional more ambitious outing, such as the [REC] films and Cloverfield. The radical film-maker Chris Petit used to muse about the aesthetic possibilities of movies made entirely from unmanned surveillance camera-footage of parking garages and service stations. I’m guessing he has long since binned that idea.
But here’s the thing: Unfriended isn’t bad. It offers a solid twist on the found-footage gimmick, in that it is seen entirely through one teenager’s laptop screen, as she Skypes and IMs with her six (five... four... three...) friends, cruises Facebook, Instagrams it up, uploads, downloads, emails and does everything else that teenagers do online. When a mysterious and anonymous intruder invades their six-way Skype session and starts planting venomous private information into their forum, the teenagers first stand together, then fall apart, then turn on one another. Is their tormentor just another sicko student? Or is it the malign spirit of a girl this septet cyber-bullied into suicide exactly one year ago this very night?
The format isn’t entirely new – an episode of Modern Family did exactly the same thing a couple of months ago – but it is a canny set of formal constrictions to impose upon oneself as a film-maker, and writer Nelson Greaves and director Levan Gabriadze outdo themselves with it for a goodly portion of the movie. At a succinct 82 minutes, Unfriended doesn’t hang around. But despite the technical complexity of what’s onscreen, we are essentially watching a six-way chamber piece.
It’s very much in the old-fashioned spirit of The Old Dark House or And Then There Were None, and depends on its young cast’s ability to transmit feelings of isolation, paranoia and claustrophobia. I’ve never heard of any of them but without their sterling efforts nothing here would work. And, as I said, Unfriended works, mostly.
Unfriended is out in cinemas on Friday 1 May
