After relentless online bullying, Laura Barns killed herself. She went out to the school yard, took a handgun, turned it on herself and that was it. Footage of the suicide remains on YouTube a year later as does the original video that started the whole thing, video of an inebriated Laura, passed out in the dirt with menstrual blood staining her shorts and legs.
Tonight, a group of friends that knew Laura have gathered on Skype for a nightly chat. Unfriended is shot entirely from this perspective, capturing the desktop of one of Laura’s friends, Blaire (Shelley Hennig), as she chats it up with her boyfriend (Moses Jacob Storm) and a growing group of friends and one unknown visitor.
Seen only as an anonymous icon in their Skype chat, it soon becomes evident someone or — dun, dun, dun — something has hacked their chat and their malevolent motivations soon become clear. Dirty secrets are revealed as the friends begin to bicker and, eventually, begin to die. Be it by drinking bleach or stuffing a curling iron down their throat, it would appear Blaire and her friends are in for a bad night. What happens when your chat box gets mad at you? Well, Unfriended is the tired and tedious answer.
I’m not against the conceit driving Unfriended in the least. In fact, Noah from Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman and it too captures events directly from one character’s desktop, but in a far more visceral fashion. Unfriended is entirely static, never shifting perspective, never focusing, or even not focusing for the matter, but instead an 82-minute window into the inevitable. The only jarring thing is the decision to get a little more violent with the night’s consequences than I expected, but that’s only because I didn’t realize it was rated R until the moment one character decided to stuff their hand in a blender.
For the most part Unfriended doesn’t work due to stale filmmaking. Despite how much is actually taking place, it really doesn’t feel as if much is going on or if the stakes are really all that high. We watch Blaire as instant messages back-and-forth with her dismissive boyfriend, lights turn off, people yell, and blarbeddy blar, derp, dorp. The idea, however, is an interesting one, if only director Levan Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves hadn’t been so worried about explaining things and instead keeping the tension high with more creative shot decisions rather than the one static image and less of a sense of stereotypical, “Muh, huh, ha ha haaaa” attitude from the malevolent source scaring the hell out of these kids.
The performances actually work, even if the characters are still just as stereotypical as the villain. Wouldn’t you know it? The overweight kid (Jasob Wysocki) just so happens to be the nerdiest of the bunch and has a Trojan horse program that just might get rid of our digital demon. Wrong-o kiddo!
I do have to wonder, however, how all of these kids can be online, in the middle of the night, screaming their heads off and none of their parents come calling. There is a moment where we learn two of the fathers are out drinking with one another, and maybe all of their parents are lushes and either at the bar getting tanked or drunk off their asses, passed out in bed. But I have to assume one of them would have heard something.
Oh well, it’s not worth getting too deep. This is a minor blip and one that will likely be done again and has been done before. The cyber-bullying angle is a smart one, as is tapping into society’s increased dependence on our digital apps and gadgets, this simply wasn’t able to tap into all of that without coming across rather obvious and, overall, inconsequential.
