'Unfriended' Inspires Only a Little Love

In 2015, social networks are not news to anyone. They have been around long enough that any movie seeking to capitalize on the novelty of Facebook or Skype gives off a faint waft of obsolescence. Levan Gabriadze’s “Unfriended” is a horror movie that tries to leverage the trappings of the digital era into a competent, menacing revenge-fest—but only with mixed results.

The film tells the story of six teenagers who find their group Skype call infiltrated by the digital ghost of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), a classmate who committed suicide precisely one year prior to the events presented in the film, in bonafide, contrived-horror-film fashion. Laura’s suicide was precipitated by the posting and promulgation of a YouTube video showing her incontinent and unconscious at a party. Now she is trying to take revenge on the kids whom she perceives as her tormentors.

The plotline is fairly standard horror-film fare and does not merit much discussion. The main point of interest in “Unfriended” is its narrative conceit: The film shows us only the laptop screen of central protagonist Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). This is a surprisingly effective gimmick. The laptop screen is notably true-to-life, with open windows scattered about and email notifications popping up every now and then. The other characters are only seen via Skype and frequently disappear behind a webpage or a Spotify window. The film makes intelligent use of Skype lag, pixelating or freezing the characters’ faces at opportune moments. That, combined with the disorganization of Blaire’s desktop screen, contributes to the tense, claustrophobic aura. The presence of subtly different forms of communication—Facebook messages, Skype calls, and instant messages, among others—allows the film to flesh out nuances in the relationships among the otherwise slightly bland characters.

Of course, the framing device is far from perfect. There is, for example, an absurd scene in which a hysterical Blaire, upon witnessing the death of yet another friend, inexplicably decides to turn to Chatroulette for aid, blubbering incoherently into the faces of about seven or so different groups of nonplussed people. This exchange, intended to be somewhat climactic, comes off as little more than comical. Blaire finally finds a sympathetic listener in Nevada whom she convinces to call the cops, accomplishing, as per horror film usual, literally nothing. And, bowing to the horror film’s inexplicable precept that the general rules of the haunting must in some way be explained to the protagonist, Blaire stumbles upon a thread on some sort of forum for the occult in which an anonymous poster has oh-so-fortuitously happened to spell out precisely the conditions and motives behind Laura’s attack.

Many of the weaknesses of “Unfriended” can be traced back to its imperfect communion with the horror film form. While it presents itself quite ably, it is unwilling to expand upon the usual content of the genre; this intransigence imparts to it a certain damning clumsiness. Its cast, for example, is the standard mass of high-school stereotypes, from the chubby tech whiz to the drunken football player to the vain primadonna. The story of the bullied suicide victim seeking revenge is trite and overdone, and the lack of subtlety in the film’s anti-cyberbullying moral is underlined by the painstaking realism of the framing device.

In its details, the film takes great care to avoid condescending to the millennial audience it claims to depict—it does not try to fool anyone with ersatz products like FaceSpace or ePods, and Blaire’s cursor movements feel natural and unforced—but the display of the larger cyberbullying motif is articulated without nuance and shows an odd, dissonant ignorance of dominant web etiquette. The video that prompts Laura’s suicide displays, towards the end, in pink, curly letters, the message “LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF."  Horror movies are rarely strengthened by over moralizing, but if they insist on doing so, they should at least seek to portray the issue they claim to represent with some sophistication. This simple-mindedness is made especially frustrating in light of the care taken in other aspects of the movie. Gabriadze comes across as cowardly rather than incompetent, and the former sin is harder to forgive.

The premise of “Unfriended” is too simplistic and clichéd to make it an effective horror film, but its careful execution makes it impossible to regard as yet another vapid, throwaway screamer flick.  In an odd way, “Unfriended” would have been more enjoyable had it been worse—the awful horror movie is, after all, an institution in its own right. As it stands, “Unfriended” awkwardly straddles campy and effective and never rises to anything more than a narrative experiment that is novel but, ultimately, uninspiring.