A lot to like about this teenage cyber-chiller
Unfriended Starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Jacob Storm. Directed by Levan Gabriadze. 82 minutes. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 14A
With friends like these, who can blame a teenager cyberbullied into committing suicide for returning from the grave for revenge?
In fact, the late Laura Barns has decided to do a little supernatural cyberbullying of her own against a group of close friends one year after fatally shooting herself, an event caught on camera and cruelly posted on the web.
It is small wonder that the late Laura is so steamed. A previous video of her lying sprawled on the ground in a drunken stupor is graphically unflattering in the extreme and includes a most unkind tag line: “kill urself.”
Teenagers in peril are as common in the horror genre as things that go bump in the night. But in the digital age, Unfriended tries something novel, putting all of the characters in the frame, so to speak, throughout the entire film. You only ever see them via the cameras embedded in their home computers.
The film’s main protagonists are Blaire (Shelley Hennig) and Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm) who engage in a little cyber-romancing with a promise of prom night nookie before friends Kennington, Adam and Jess show up.
When Val joins in and soon becomes the first one to exit in a fatal fashion, it gives the remaining five friends their first warning that something very strange and scary is afoot.
None of the usual tricks they try to get rid of the mysterious, faceless blue icon named billie227 has any effect and going to the website, unexplainedforum.net, is of no help whatever. By the time they read “do not answer msgs from the dead,” it’s far too late to take heed.
From there, it’s a game of cat and mouse between the teens and billie227, whom it soon becomes clear isn’t your typical Internet troll. The rules as dictated by billie227 dictate that signing off means checking out for good in a grisly fashion.
It also seems that each player has at least one “dirty little secret,” which billie227 knows and uses to set them against each other. Not surprisingly, tensions and panic rise as the group session progresses, more or less in real time.
Director Levan Gabriadze is rather hamstrung by the concept, which has five or six faces bobbing on the big screen throughout. But he makes good use of the computer screen format, using the blurring and freezing that often happens with digital cams to add a creepy subtext to the story.
The concept also doesn’t give the actors much to work with and, with the earliest victims particularly, much of a chance to create a character or back story. Everyone looks outraged at first that someone is impersonating poor dead Laura before eventually surrendering to panic and terror.
Still, Shelley Hennig manages to create a believably sympathetic character in Blaire, alongside her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm).
The script by Nelson Greaves is clever but it doesn’t entirely navigate successfully throughout, with an ending that is a tad unsatisfactory. One also doesn’t want to ponder too deeply about how a malevolent spirit manages to seize control of the Internet and to induce her victims to dispatch themselves.
Still, younger audiences in particular are likely to enjoy this entertaining and fast-paced chiller. And who knows? They may even absorb the film’s underlying message, that what you put online “will live forever,” even if its characters don’t.