Beware taking a byte from a poisoned Apple

A NOtiONAL sequel to the 2014 horror film Unfriended, but really a standalone project marking the directorial debut of screenwriter Stephen Susco, Unfriended: Dark Web might make you want to go home and throw your laptop away. Or give thanks that you don’t have one.

At any rate, as the title implies, the film explores that sinister side of the internet where predators and perverts flourish. Like the original film, this one unfolds almost entirely on a computer screen, which at first feels like a teasing novelty, but soon gets more than a little tiresome. if you’re not fluent in System Preferences and don’t know your way round Facebook and Skype, then this is definitely not for you.

At the centre of the story is an American man in his 20s, matias (Colin Woodell), who has claimed a stranger’s Apple mac from lost property at an internet cafe. more fool him.

the laptop, it soon emerges, has some deeply weird stuff on it, leading matias, the pals in his group Skype sessions and his deaf girlfriend headlong into a grotesque world of extreme sexual deviancy, not to mention abduction and murder.

the film is nicely acted and ingeniously constructed, but actually its very ingenuity becomes a problem, because we are forced to believe in a set of cyber- skills that become increasingly, almost ludicrously, implausible. Still, as a scary modern fable, a kind of warped fairy tale, it is quite effective. A fairy tale, when you think about it, that’s all about someone unwisely taking a byte of a poisoned Apple.

The Darkest Minds is based on a young-adult novel and plays out like a pallid version of the hunger games or Divergent films. it even stars the hunger games actress Amandla Stenberg. She plays Ruby, a teenager infected by a disease that is killing all American children, except those it doesn’t kill, who are rounded up by the state and forced to live in internment camps.

Director Jennifer yuh Nelson, whose first live-action picture this is (she previously brought us Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3), lightens all the sci-fi dystopia with an old-fashioned summer-camp love story, but as a result the film feels muddled, neither entirely one thing nor entirely the other.

i think its young target audience will feel a little short-changed.