Film review: Unfriended

Unfriended
Director: Leo Gabriadze
Starring: Shelley Hennig, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz
Two stars
Taking aim at cyberbullies on their home turf, Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended envisions an I Know What You Did Last Summer-style vengeance scenario conducted by a ghost entirely through social media.
Presented as if it were being witnessed on one of the protagonists’ laptops, the film sticks with its gimmick more honestly than Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows, which has a similar visual conceit. However, it’s substantially less successful dramatically than in technical terms.
The setting is a group Skype chat in which five high-school friends log on together for no reason other than to have company while wasting hours of their youth sitting alone in their bedrooms.
Around the time they realise this is the anniversary of the suicide of Laura Burns, a classmate they all hated, a mysterious sixth person enters the chat – an anonymous digital intruder claiming to be Laura’s spirit.
Assuming it to be a creepy hacker, they try to hang up on “him” – but this hacker has skills and they fail. He’s soon taunting them (and a sixth friend) across an array of digital platforms, controlling texts, video messages, social media and so on.
As the friends grow increasingly agitated, he turns them against each other by revealing secrets he has no way of knowing – betrayals, insults and worse – before proceeding to inflict grisly physical punishments that apparently involve psychic control.
These kids are more loathsome than the average victims of slasher-flick bogeymen and the young actors have little success (if they’re trying) in making them interesting, despite their shallow nastiness. As the film begins knocking them off in the usual ways, we can’t even take pleasure in their deaths.
By the gory final moments, the picture finds ways to wrench the annoyance level higher, with goofy on-screen animation and an inexplicable plea for help to the nonplussed denizens of ­Chatroulette.
While much of the screen-hopping that precedes this has a messy believability – with the lead bully flicking, ADHD-style, between monitoring BitTorrent, choosing Pandora tunes, researching the paranormal on Wikipedia and using four or five different technologies to communicate with her frenemies – in the end, one would rather be back at one’s own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.