Unfriended (2014)

 

Director: Leo Gabriadze

Screenplay: Nelson Greaves

Cast: Shelley Hennig as Blaire Lily; Moses Storm as Mitch Roussel; Renee Olstead as Jess Felton; Will Peltz as Adam Sewell; Jacob Wysocki as Ken Smith; Courtney Halverson as Val Rommel; Heather Sossaman as Laura Barns

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #258

 

I love the tops of toes.

Sometimes you have to watch a film to see what the popular culture is like. Pretentious to write, but as someone who fully immersed himself into the outskirts of the moving pictures medium, I rarely if ever catch up with what is popular. One company I have tried a few times with, Blumhouse, has been for me really disappointing. They on paper have promised so much - their 2018 remake-sequel of Halloween which suggests updating Halloween H20's PTSD themes with Jamie Lee Curtis with David Gordon Green as the director, or their 2020 The Invisible Man being a salient take on domestic abuse themes - only to disappoint me when they barely cover the promising and thoughtful ideas of those particular examples. How ironic now that, with a film that was popular but suggests nothing of the sort profound, Unfriended manages whilst still being an entertaining thrill ride first to live up to more than those two films above I have mentioned. From a Georgian-Russian filmmaker Leo Gabriadze, who in a really curious cross-pollination of cinema had a major role in his teens in the cult Soviet sci-fi film Kin-dza-dza! (1986), this probably stands out more for me from an unexpected source, an influence who, as I will get into, with Gabriadze have taken a really inventive direction with horror cinema. With one of the producers being Timur Bekmambetov, this involves the Russian company he founded the Bazelevs Company and is part of a fascinating little niche of theirs, an attempt at a new genre Bekmambetov has had his company involved in called "Screenlife" films.

For me, Bekmambetov came to attention as for many outside Russian for Night Watch (2004), his ambitious dark fantasy adaptation of a novel series, part of a series, and it is fascinating that the man who attempted to make a very unique, but extensively CGI heavy and glitzy, horror-fantasy work that managed to get a 20th Century Fox release internationally has taken it into his stride to bring modernity into cinema further. They have made a few of these films, including Searching (2018) with John Cho, in this "screenlife" genre and the idea behind them is to tell narratives from the point-of-view of a computer or Smartphone. Without even knowing this originally coming into this film, I wanted to see Unfriended just because it was a modern film, literally because it was one about the internet, something I am in a weird position with as a Millennial still older than most that use YouTube and Skype more than me, and Generation Zs ("zoomers") who are even younger, but with still enough of an upbringing (and fascination) to take real interest in a film like this. Unfriended is very much a modern take on a slasher film crossed with supernatural horror, but the individuals actually behind the film, released by Blumhouse, gave me something really clever and interesting.

I am from the time, in the early 2000s as a young teenager, when the internet was still new but not some alien technology. It was in secondary school (high school) with the school computers when the internet really felt prominent for me, when Wikipedia was a new thing that came to be, and already allowed someone too young to in learning of some of the lurid genre films I would get to, and one day in the late 2000s or even start of the 2010s did I adapt to YouTube. Skype is something that exists as a way to communicate, but despite having once signed up on Twitter, I never used it and barely use Facebook. This is important as, whilst keeping myself (without boasting) up to date with trends over that decade to now, I am still alien to this whilst not lost in the dark, making Unfriended a curious film for me to see in mind to the ideals of "screenlife" films, clearly meant to follow up on the modern trends in culture. Considering horror films still have to negotiate around mobile phones being a factor in screenplays, this feels extremely advance and current as a film where, told on one computer, it belongs here to Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). She is an absent friend to Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), a girl who committed suicide with gunshot after being bullied and humiliated online. One night, when Blaire with friends get together on Skype for an online video call together, there is an unknown additional member of the group call, deciding to punish these friends over Laura's death, all told without leaving the computer and its many functions many of us use part of the storytelling.

Verisimilitude is a huge factor, Timur Bekmambetov having become someone, when he developed this concept of cinema in the Bazelevs Company, who found this concept of using computer's functions for drama and storytelling a meaningful one to investigate, experimenting in multiple genres with collaborators and being accurate with the technology even in post-production and the filmic equipment used¹. This is meaningful, where at the same time this goes out of its way to have real media used, to the point I wonder how many fake Facebook profiles were created for the social media site to make this film possible, it also exposed whatheever the intention, and to the film's benefit, the problematic and unexpected issues with these sites and tech morally with how it relates to use. Unfriended in its own way is the pulpier, brattier cousin to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001). Pulse was a sombre, superior film where ghosts haunt the new medium of the internet, but Unfriended envisions less an apocalyptic scenario with the older film but a morality tale, where this interest in seeing the drama exposed when someone using their computers, taking calls online even mid-conversation with someone else for example, exposes who they are or, in a way, the masks worn online.  The characters in this film are revealed to not be likable figures, none of them, as this opens with the lead watching a leaked video of Laura committing suicide at school on an obscure site. Obviously, this presents Unfriended as a film where some will cheer on their demises, including by way of self-infliction of a blender to the face, but this follows an old school morality tale of just punishment and tells the flaws of human beings, especially when forced by threat to expose their lies and fatal flaws, in gristly manner.

It is pretty simple, though the reference to the slasher genre is befitting as, structurally, it takes the template of picking people off but boils it down and bolts it to this morality tale, which is pretty poignant in what it is talking of. Films like the 2018 Halloween felt pretentious and barely tackled their themes. Here it is blatant and obvious, but stands out because it does not deviate from the subject even if surface level, still gaining something from pointing out the obvious but tragically significant still. That unfortunately concepts like bullying and hierarchy even among teenagers still existed when this film was released but, as gotten to the point social media sites among other issues were being taken to task even in court hearings in the 2010s, these concepts bled and changed with new technology. The film is not profound in terms of suggesting greater meaning, but sometimes having the obvious told in a gristly morality play like this is enough to praise especially as this tackles the subject in a new way.

For me, the most interesting thing that led to me watching this was the decision to portray the narrative through other online media, and it works. It would have been perversely delightful to have seen this on a cinema screen, the computer screen's fragmentation in distractions and screens-within-screens made more if seen projected on a giant theatrical screen. Screens and windows cover each other, as the film economically tells its simple narrative without feeling contrived or limited by its format restrictions. It presents the moving picture image in a new way, and far from trivialising it, forcing one to look at one's computer (or Smartphone if the other "screenlife" films are as successful) in a meaningful shade by forcing it into the world of the cinematic image.

It feels fresh even if tropes for old slasher films still exist - the stoner, now a vulgar computer hacker, is here for example - but takes the logical step in mind to what the target audience for such a film would be interested in whilst not feeling like a contrived cash-in, but something more meaningful. It offers director Leo Gabriadze and his production team a lot of interesting challenges and innovations for an obvious plot narrative, so much so this feels fresh even now the film had a sequel and time has passed. And it finds, even if not a scary film for me, suitably creepy ways to make the idea of ghosts not alien to the modern world. It felt, to be brutally honest, Western horror films took a longer time than the East did, even in mind that may be an inaccurate bias I may have even stating that. Japanese horror cinema was tackling these subjects with mobile phones and the VHS tape in the nineties at least, but here with a film trying it with thought, even a music player, which will not stop playing a certain track, is startling, as is the unseen additional member of the Skype call show. Even if obvious, the really creative ways to scare someone here are surprising.

It also presents, in a more accessibly and less bleak way, the darker side of the internet. The sequel is subtitled "The Dark Web", based on the real concept, though already mythologized, of how with certain software like Tor that allowed anonymous communication, there is an alternative world of the internet, for some the liberated and uncensored form, but also unfortunately the place of horrible real activities, let alone ones fabricated through Creepy Pasta scare tales. Unfriended just with the surface level version, baring the suicide video linked to, already presents the horrors of how a blog or twitter page can paint an image of one, how one's skeleton in the closet can easily leak online to expose your corruption, or how it can encourage the potential barbarism in a person. Even the suicide video, a little aspect, reaches an uncomfortable truth of how suicide videos do leek online in reality. Even though this was, for me, a fun horror film that I had low expectations for but appreciated, Unfriended does so subconsciously because these ideas come together alongside this unique way to adapt to the modern world. Even if "screenlife" films become antiquated in a decade or so, they offer if they are like this one a fascinating historical marker for how one should gauge with this online technology, and I have to praise everyone involved with the film for doing this.

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1) An article that talks of this idea of the "screenlife" films can be found HERE.