Unfriended Review (Film, 2015) The Archives #31DaysofHorror
content warning: death by suicide, gore
You never know what you’re going to get when a horror film is built around a technology gimmick. This could be a plot device like The Ring making you fear video rental stores or Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows toying with the sustainability and accuracy of digital video stock.
Unfriended goes a step further than most and hitches itself on the desktop view of a teenager’s computer. The entire paranormal slasher is shown on a MacBook desktop screen and told through Chrome, Skype, Instagram, and Facebook.
The only problems that happen in the film literally occur because of the limitations of this media choice. Early on, when our hero Blaire is revisiting the death by suicide of her best friend Laura on the one year anniversary of her death, quite a few of the dates in YouTube, Facebook, and news sites don’t actually line up with the chronology of the film. They’re blink and you’ll miss them continuity errors that you actively have to look for. Frankly, they’re pretty forgivable, too, since everything else director Levan Gabriadze attempts with this social network culture horror film is so good.
The plot of Unfriended is simple and effective. Six friends chat in Skype with a mysterious seventh person on the call. That person claims to be the ghost of Laura who wants them to confess to their roles in her death by suicide. One by one, the friends are forced to play various games all connected to the same rule: you log off, you die. Tell the truth and you might get out alive. Unfriended is a powerful narrative about cyberbullying, new forms of communication, and the inescapable social structures that surround us all.
Unfriended is a film made to look like a computer screen, but it could not exist if the world had not so radically shifted to new digital interactions in the past few years. These young people cannot escape their peers because they are constantly linked into each other with every device they own. The six friends in the film use their cellphones and laptops as weapons and shields to fight against their own past. They also repeatedly fail because the inherent dryness of instant text-based interactions has a direct impact on the ability to actual communicate face to face in an honest way.
These young people have been removed so far from being present in their own lives that they convince themselves the creation of a “joke” campaign aimed at a mean girl isn’t their fault. It doesn’t matter that the mean girl died because of the video they took, edited, posted, shared, and mocked; it’s just how it is on the Internet. It’s not serious until it is too late.
Unfriended is a time capsule of the worst of online social interactions made all the more powerful by presenting it from the perspective of a teenager’s computer screen. We’re constantly plugged into a borderless alternate world where everyone can save or destroy a life with a few clicks. The paranormal elements in the story don’t need nearly as much examination as the all-too-real computer-based relationships that drive the story. Accept that the paranormal can happen because we struggle to remain in the here and now.
