I despise social media. Given the demographic I am in, that isn’t much of a surprise. I especially found it annoying when Facebook was at its peak popularity. My Mom still thinks of it, and only it, as “the internet”. I found it strange how so many people were only sharing information through that app, and seemed to be insulted if you weren’t constantly following them and so missed anything. I was even a couple of degrees separated from somebody who, if they weren’t friends with you on Facebook, would have nothing to do with you in real life. I found it easy to decide this technology was something I didn’t care to mess with.
I remember my reaction to first hearing of 2014’s Unfriended prior to its release, which is basically “That Facebook Movie”, wherein a malevolent spirit torments some teenagers on a group chat in the app. This is in the wheelhouse of found footage (a genre I am quite fond of), except we’re only seeing everything as it happens and not watching a playback of it later. I was a tad curious why anybody would make a movie where we see everything in real time from the perspective of one person’s laptop screen.
At best, I figured it might be an interesting, but failed, high-concept experiment like 2002’s Phone Booth. At worst, it might be paying to see little more than a feature-length advertisement for Facebook. Given that, I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the Mr. Show sketch where a movie is made about the country’s most popular coupon. Then I realized a bunch of self-centered assholes who are obsessed with social media will be killed by a malevolent spirit and I realized I could be on board with this.
That laptop belongs to Shelly Hennig. When the film starts, she is engaged in a flirtatious video chat with boyfriend Moses Storm. Judging from the conversation, she’s a virgin, but says she will be giving it up on prom night. She just wants it to be special. I thought she just wanted to be a stereotype. It is no surprise the plot will circle back to the subject of this conversation later.
One thing that is difficult to do with found footage (or, again, films at least in the ballpark of found footage) is to have a soundtrack. After all, whatever music we hear has to be diegetic. I was initially annoyed when the makers of this figured out a way around that restriction, as we see Hennig select tracks from her playlist that hear. To my surprise, this seemingly innocuous thing will actually play into the ghost’s torments of her later.
Anywho, Hennig and Storm’s flirting is interrupted by the arrival of their friends. It is interesting how quickly we get a read on them without much backstory. Renee Olstead is a catty gossip, Courtney Halverson a hard-partyer, Will Peltz is the kind of guy guaranteed to join a frat in college, and Jacob Wysocki is the comic relief and technical expertise. These former friends of Heather Sossaman have gathered here on the one-year anniversary of her suicide.
We’ll see a video of her demise, and I found it odd. It wasn’t that somebody was filming it. Heck, I’d be shocked if somebody hadn’t. No, it is that she shoots herself standing up and holding the gun as the end of her locked arms. I know most attempted suicides are a cry for help, but she might as well have pointed the gun in the opposite direction and waited to see if the bullet would circle the globe and hit her in the back of the head. But, no, her dumb luck has her improbably blowing her head off.
It had been harassment that drove Sossaman to kill herself. Care to guess which people may have contributed the most to that treatment? Another element of this I found curious is what specifically led this bunch to hate her so much. Hennig, in particular, is revealed to have been friends with deceased going back to early childhood.
From what little video footage we see of Sossaman, she was a real piece of work. We’re not given any reason to side with her because we never see or hear anything that presents her as anybody we’d want to know. And we’ll soon discover her old “friends” are deeply horrible people, so it seems to me they all deserve each other.
Now she’s an uninvited and anonymous visitor in their Skype chatroom, one they can’t kick out. I like a bit where Halverson threatens to kick this mysterious visitor’s ass, only to get this reply: “Sounds great. But I don’t think you’d like it here” Through text prompts, she informs them anybody who leaves the chat will die. It is not a empty threat.
It is amazing how fast everybody turns on each other, all to ready to throw each other under the proverbial bus. The ghost does things like posting compromising photos on their Facebook pages. In one especially neat bit, the spirit takes control of the laptop, blaring a track that is ironic for the moment. Everything will culminate in a game of “Never Have I Ever” which becomes so vicious that the spirit eventually just sits on the sidelines while those it is tormenting yell out their own questions nobody wants to know the answers to.
One aspect of the set-up that is put to good use is the restriction of our view to a single laptop screen. What Hennig starts to type is always more interesting than what she finally sends. There’s one element I wish had been explored more, and that is the suggestion her side conversations with individuals may be her unwittingly communicating with the ghost.
And yet, the technology used here poses a hurdle for me. In general, I have difficulty feigning interest in movies where ghosts use technology. Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, or even an afterlife, something just feels too complicated about computer technology for it to be manipulated by spirits. For whatever reason, I can handle ghosts hurling physical objects, or even manipulating more primitive technology such as landline phones, but them becoming computer literate is something I have trouble accepting. Maybe there are computer literacy courses in the thereafter.
After organizing my thoughts on Unfriended, I decided to check out some reviews of it on-line. I was surprised by how largely unliked the picture appears to be. In particular, I was taken aback by the number of critics who wondered why should care about such shallow, despicable people or what happens to them. I feel they missed the point. The lot of them, including the victim of their harassment, were all horrible. Nothing in the film suggests as much, but I suspect that, had another of their lot committed suicide, and Sossaman had lived, the outcome would have been the same. It just would been a different person in the group playing the ghost.
Dir: Nelson Greaves
Starring some people I’m not sure I have seen in anything else, and that may partly be due to how effectively they play such monsters here
Watched on blu-ray