On the anniversary of Laura Barns’ suicide, several of her friends are skyping online when they notice a curious, anonymous participant logged into their call. One of them receives a text – allegedly from Laura – and things get real weird, real quick.
If you’re not comfortable with texting, Facebook and Skype – and not too sure about email – then this is not the movie for you. If you are conversant with all things internet and cyberspace, you are Unfriended’s audience and you will probably really enjoy it.
Blaire (Shelly Hennig, Teen Wolf), Val (Courtney Halvorsen, Death Valley), Matt (Matthew Bohrer, Generic Girl), Adam (Will Peltz, In Time), Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm, The 4 to 9ers: The Day Crew), Jess (Renee Olstead, The Secret Life of the American Teenager) and Ken (Jacob Wysocki, Pitch Perfect, Interns) are Laura’s (Heather Sossamon, Days of Our Lives) friends on the call.
Blaire gets a text from Laura’s account even as the call goes on. Steadily, the others are made aware that something is wrong and eventually, the mystery caller is identified as Billie227 – again from Laura’s account.
Between the group’s efforts to disconnect from Billie (which, it turns out they cannot do) and whoever Billie is unleashing their worst secrets on them – only putting them through a tiny bit of the humiliation visited on Laura – it becomes clear that who/whatever Billie is, they are stuck with him/her/it.
One memorable sequence comes when Blaire is asked to forward a message to the group and when she clicks on the box to reach that option, all that’s there is the ‘reply’ button.
Then people start dying.
By skipping back and forth between the skyping, texting, googling and such, writer Nelson Greaves (Sleepy Hollow) and director Leo Gabriadze create a living breathing world that requires no great amount of effects to feel real – and allow the pacing to be jigged and rejigged to match the emotional reactions of the group as things proceed.
The idea of something living in cyberspace – be it a cyber-creature of some sort, or a vengeful spirit – isn’t exactly new (see: anime classic Ghost In The Machine), but it’s handled with intelligence and wit here (though my crappy internet reception is considerably better than these guys’ – but that could be the cyberstalker).
Unfriended is a rarity – a smart, well thought out horror movie that never needs to exceed its PG-13 rating to scare the bejesus out of its audience.
Final Grade: A
Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures