Unfriended
Starring Shelley Hennig, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz
Rated MA15+ for strong themes, violence and coarse language
UNFRIENDED is a surprisingly decent horror movie, despite its poor characters.
On the first anniversary of her death, a ghost haunts the Skype conversation of five friends whose online harassment drove her to suicide.
Unfriended is a commendable effort to tell a modern horror story about social media and cyberbullying.
The film has effective slow-burning suspense punctuated by horrific violence, and even some good subtle foreshadowing involving household objects.
It was a potentially foolish decision to have the film take place entirely on a computer desktop, but Unfriended makes the most of its confined “setting”, with distortions and tell-tale glitches suggesting ghostly influence and keeping you on edge.
This feels like a filmed “creepypasta”, which is the term for horror stories and urban legends circulated on (and often about) the internet.
Unfortunately, Unfriended’s terrible characters are a major stumbling point.
Yes, they’re hormonal, judgemental teens; they’re supposed to be terrible. But they’re one-dimensionally mean and uninteresting, so you don’t really care when they start dying.
The film steadily culls the cast down to the likeable few, but the ghost has long since made up its mind and the final deaths become inevitable, thus sapping the tension.
Unfriended is well worth checking out, but it’s much better if taken as a revenge movie for the ghost than as a survival movie for the mortals.
– SETH HYNES
