There are some films you can’t watch on your phone or your tablet, films you absolutely need to see on the big screen – like Lawrence of Arabia or Metropolis. Weirdly, Unfriended is one of them.
It’s a nasty, tasty supernatural horror about cyberbullying and social media that takes place entirely online, in fact more or less entirely on one computer screen. But you can’t watch it on a titchy computer screen yourself without losing its essential flavour, and missing out on the eerie “blow-up” effect. You have to see those browsers, with all their irritating little features and insidious ads and prompts, all those designs that have become embedded in your subconscious mind, magnified to the size of Stonehenge. Part of the creepy effect of this movie, from screenwriter Nelson Greaves and director Leo Gabriadze, is just showing there’s something uncanny and strange about living your life online. This is the huge altar at which we are all worshipping.
Unfriended in many ways plays out on classic lines, familiar from Carrie or I Know What You Did Last Summer, with a touch of Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth, about the guy who picks up a ringing phone in a public booth and gets told by a disembodied voice he’ll be shot if he hangs up or leaves. Some friends hang out online in a group Skype chat, incessantly switching to Facebook and instant messaging (though they’re not into Twitter): we see the gallery of their faces on screen, with a ghostly glow. They’re like civilian astronauts in space, or rather, cyberspace.
The main character is Blaire, played by Shelley Hennig: a name that I like to think might be a homage to the Blair Witch Project, and if Unfriended spawns a cyber genre, it could be a sort of real-time update to the style that film inspired: a found footage 2.0. She is in a relationship with Mitch (Moses Storm); one with strange, abusive undertones, but also has a connection with Adam (Will Peltz). Ken (Jacob Wysocki) is the chubby, nerdy guy, Jess (Renee Olstead) is the hot blonde and Val (Courtney Halverson) is the semi-tolerated member of the group. The film shows how, with Val, their bullying behaviour patterns start to play out for a second time.
Without wanting to admit it to each other or themselves, the characters in Unfriended have a shameful secret. They recently ganged up to bully a girl they all knew, with terrible results: a kind of “frenemy” they all tolerated and disliked, and justified their actions on the grounds that their victim herself was a bully. But then they notice that another user has joined their conversation: a silent observer, a lurker, represented by the anonymous generic head-and-shoulders avatar.
This stranger begins to freak them out, and there is something obscene in simply seeing this familiar “egg” motif at movie-screen size in all its implacable deadness and inertness. The inevitable Skype freeze-frames are chilling and Greaves and Gabriadze use the strange array of sounds cleverly – and amplify them. The film beeps and blurps like a heart monitor from hell. I jumped out of my seat at the sudden, chilling melody of the Skype ring, and felt the dull, dead “thump” of clicking on an unresponsive link like a punch. Characters are shown selecting tracks from Spotify to match their mood at various points, blurring the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music. The window for instant messaging obscures the characters’ facial expressions at key points, and you can see a character’s mind working in the way sentences are typed in, deleted, modified, and then sent.
Unfriended really is the first film that has successfully represented online existence on the movie screen: Jason Reitman’s black comedy Men, Women & Children made a decent attempt, but was sunk by the necessity of moving out into the real world, making the online material look redundant and forced. And Unfriended is a thousand times better than the terrible and lame cyber-voyeur drama-thrillers once fashionable more than a decade ago: films such as William Malone’s Feardotcom and Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover; Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom was also a crunching disappointment. Unfriended is from a new generation: film-makers who now have the web in their bloodstream, for whom online interaction is a natural part of life. They’ve used a new language to create a smart, ingenious, subversive and scary movie.
