VENGEANCE GOES VIRAL
Tech-horror genre gets Unfriended
UNFRIENDED ★★ ★ ★ Starring: Shelley Hennig, Moses Jacob Storm Directed by: Levan Gabriadze Running time: 83 minutes
Vengeance goes viral in the latest take on the found-footage horror flick. The twist this time, and what makes this movie jump higher than most jump-scare efforts, is that the footage isn’t found after the fact. We watch in real time as high school students confront what appears to be an online demon.
The setup is simple. Blaire (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm) are getting a little hot and heavy on Skype when a group of their friends suddenly join the chat. Val, Ken, Jess and Adam are familiar, but there’s also a ghostly default profile picture in the mix.
It doesn’t take long for the mystery caller to identify herself as Laura Barns, who died exactly one year earlier, a suicide driven to kill herself by online bullying.
The rest of the kids are understandably spooked, but also disbelieving.
Unfriended is the English-language feature debut of Georgian director Levan Gabriadze. But the big name on the project is producer Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian director of Day Watch, Night Watch and next year’s remake of Ben-Hur. He’d spent so much time at his computer in recent years that he’d been itching for a story set in front of one.
The film is definitely that. After a glitchy, artifact-strewn studio logo, we spend the next 83 minutes looking at Blaire’s screen as windows open and close. It’s a clever conceit, and allows for some amusing warps in cinematic conventions. Most movies let you put their soundtracks on iTunes. This one actually plays on iTunes within the movie.
The all-screen format also lets the cast multitask, as when Blaire talks to her friends while texting Mitch. And something as simple as a pointer hesitating or pacing between two windows provides its own window into her motivation. Blaire also keeps returning to a Google search result that warns: “Do not answer messages from the dead!”
Horror films often exist at the juncture of cutting-edge technology and bleeding-edge fear, whether it’s the haunted VHS tape in Ring, the child-sucking TV in Poltergeist or those aliendetecting sunglasses Roddy Piper wears in They Live.
Unfriended is an excellent addition to the canon. Its only potential downside is the inevitable knock-offs and possible sequels, none of which can match this one’s first-out-of-the-gate pleasures.
It creates a slow build of fear and somehow feels even shorter than its actual duration: Time flies when you’re scared witless.