Unfriended

Levan Gabriadze's Unfriended is essentially a hi-tech and effective variant of the kind of movie Roger Ebert used to like to call a "dead teenager movie".  Those are the kind of horror movies that starts with a bunch of teenagers being alive, and then ends with all of them being dead.  The movie sets itself apart from the norm by being set entirely on the Internet, and filmed with Skype cameras.  The movie is authentic in its depiction of chat rooms, both video and message, and creates a certain tense atmosphere as it builds.

The character types have not changed much from the "dead teenager movies" of the past.  We have the nice girl Blaire (Shelley Hennig), the boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), the blonde Jess (Renee Olstead), the overweight and obnoxious Ken (Jacob Wysocki), the best friend Adam (Will Peltz), and finally Val (Courtney Halverson), the catty girl that everyone pretends to like, but talks behind her back.  The friends are video chatting with each other, when a mysterious and unidentified person joins in on the chat.  The friends trace the account to Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), a classmate and former friend of Blaire's who killed herself one year ago after an embarrassing video of her being drunk at a party showed up on line, and she was shunned by everyone.  The friends initially brush it off as a glitch or a computer error, but the mysterious account cannot be blocked or removed from the conversation.

That's when the mysterious account starts joining in the chat, and begins threatening the friends.  It begins exposing their individual secrets through text messages, videos and images that are sent to the individual kids.  They also learn that whoever is doing this is also somehow watching them, and manipulating their environment. (Their lights suddenly turn off at random.) During the course of the night, sexual and embarrassing secrets about the individual kids are revealed, and they start turning up dead one by one, apparently by suicide.  The movie suggests that Laura's spirit is somehow taking vengeance on these kids who either mistreated her, or mocked her in the past.  The cast is slowly depleted in various ways, but the movie never fails to keep a dark sense of humor in tact, such as when the song "How You Lie, Lie, Lie" by Connie Conway begins playing from the kids' computers when the mysterious entity is forcing the kids to reveal their darkest secrets.

Unfriended is the rare found footage film that works, because it understands the technology that it's using to tell the story.  This isn't one of those movies where computers are doing impossible things.  One of the clever ways that the movie manages to build suspense to have the cameras lag or break up from time to time, so we can tell that something horrible is happening to one of the chatters, but we only see pieces of it.  What we do see (a kid sticking their hand in a blender under the influence of the evil spirit, or another putting a gun to their head) creates enough shock value, and the movie is smart to show just enough, but not overdo it.  The fact that we can't see everything, and the Internet camera will suddenly black out at a key moment actually makes it somewhat more suspenseful.  And as the kids slowly turn against each other in order to keep each other alive, it creates a realistic sense of what these characters would do in a desperate situation.

What Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves understand is that the unknown is scarier than something that is overly explained.  We get the basic idea that the spirit of this dead teenage girl is messaging her former friends from beyond the grave, and is even possessing them to kill themselves in gruesome ways.  The movie is smart enough to never actually explain how this is happening.  It does at least give us an answer to the obvious question - Why don't the kids just sign off?  The answer: The spirit of Laura threatens to kill them if they do.  It's not a perfect answer, but it works well enough within the context of the film.  This is not a deep or a complex film, but it's effective at what it wants to do.  We laugh, we jump a little, and it's fun to watch it in a crowded theater that's really getting into it.  I doubt this movie would work any other way.  In other words, it's almost certain to lose something on DVD.

Unfriended is clever in the way it uses things we use everyday like Facebook, jpegs, and Youtube, and makes it seem threatening.  That's really what makes the film successful, is how it taps into our normal lives, and puts a sinister spin on it.  I highly doubt anyone will be ripping their computers out after watching this, but it may make them pause a little when they get an e-mail from someone they don't recognize.

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