Unfriended: Dark Web
⋆⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: R for some disturbing violence, language and sexual references. In English, American Sign Language and Vietnamese.
Prepare to be creeped out big time. In his feature debut, writer/director Stephen Susco creates a bleak, relentless online horror story. Unusually plot-oriented, with a command of pace and rhythm and tone, the film is genuinely electrifying.
It applies the classic norms of a home invasion shocker in impressively tech-savvy computer screen storytelling. Our point of view throughout is the screen of a laptop computer, where every moment of a cursor hovering over a button, a typed message, a lagging video transmission or an unexpected alert tone cranks up the anxiety. Internet-based fright films are becoming the genre of the season, but here it feels both innovative and diabolically merciless. It is to the web what "Jaws" was to saltwater.
Colin Woodell is very effective as Matias, the film's flawed hero, a lovelorn nerd programming an American Sign Language app to better communicate with his deaf girlfriend. The film's innovative visual language resembles the actual record of a half-dozen male and female friends sharing a digital game night. The webcam of his new laptop puts him in the largest quadrant on-screen, with the others spaced around on Facebook chats, Skype connections and iPhone FaceTime calls, all on-screen simultaneously.
The mood starts off light, developing a melancholy downer quality as the protagonist and his girlfriend move toward a breakup. Then, as he pokes into hidden files left by the computer's previous owner, malevolent forces connect with the clique in real life, pressure them one by one to relinquish control and turn cyber bullying into a literal blood sport. We're afraid of unknowable dangers everywhere.
The film earns each suspension of disbelief and howl of shock fair and square, exploiting our sympathies for Matias and his friends, all of whom are good but vulnerable people. Step by step, it descends into the scariest use of media since ghouls took over the TVs in "The Ring" and "Poltergeist."
Susco essentially launches a cyberattack against the audience from the movie screen. He understands that the brain has a finite bandwidth for processing alarm stimuli and overwhelms us with a flood of dreadful information. Though it is at times difficult to watch, it torments us with atmosphere that grows increasingly suffocating and brief moments of monstrous violence rather than gallons of blood and gristle. While it reportedly has come to theaters with at least two alternate endings, the incredibly unhappy fashion in which my viewing climaxed was so dark that after the shock wore off, I grudgingly admired it.
