Unfriended

A warning film for the teenage YouTube generation.

I’m grateful that social media didn’t exist when I was a teenager. At least when the bastards bullied me, it was to my face and the abuse (if not the ruminating fears and nightmares) stayed within school hours. The Internet used to be an escape from reality, a magical dreamland where someone like myself could feel assured about their place in the world, but thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on everyone using their true identities for the benefit of advertisers, it became a grinding continuation of real life.

Cyberbullying has turned into a major problem among teenagers as people are targeted by cowards who take advantage of anonymity. Suddenly, the only way to truly escape is to switch off; exile oneself from the modern world. And for those who grew up never knowing a life before the digital age, this can equal disconnecting together.

Unfriended starts on mobile phone footage of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman) committing suicide, the most private moment anyone can experience uploaded onto LiveLeak.com for all to see. Attached in the description is a link to the Youtube video that drove her to it, which shows her passed out drunk at a party, having defecated herself. Unfriended is then told through the point of view of Blaire Lily’s (Shelley Hennig) MacBook screen. Skype airs the group chat between her friends, iMessage and Facebook Messenger record the aside conversations, and Spotify provides the soundtrack. However, a blank profile keeps appearing in the Skype group despite their best attempts to remove it. At first it’s written off as a glitch, but it soon transpires to be the ghost of Laura, seeking revenge on those responsible for the video.

The film combines the found-footage elements of The Blair Witch Project with the task-based sadism of the Saw series. The ghost of Laura plays games while gleefully counting down to the deaths of her victims. In exacting revenge for her own humiliation, she digs out the darkest secrets about them – who we thought were six innocent teenagers turn out to be self-centred, pathological liars.

Sordid tales and revelations over who started nasty rumours lead to the friends turning on each other, to the extent where they willingly say and do things in the name of self-preservation. Director Leo Gabriadze does a decent job of ramping up the tension, especially during a game of ‘Never Have I Ever’ in which the loser will die. The personal issues at hand, accompanied by extreme amounts of screaming and shouting, appear inconsequential to a well-adjusted individual. I mean, does who you sleep with when you’re 16 really matter in the long run? But when you’re under constant scrutiny by your peers on social networks, with everything posted on there an everlasting document, it’s no wonder death becomes a consideration.

Unfriended’s use of GoPros disguised as webcams works well because the story is told in real time. There are no leaps in logic one finds in the found-footage genre as it justifies why the victims stay on their computers instead of running away (death threats; a source of light; sheer voyeurism). The sole oddity comes from how everyone Skypes through laptops alone, making a recent episode of Modern Family with the same gimmick more technologically apt. But the laptops result in the use of digital artefacts, compression and other glitches that add to the uniquely eerie atmosphere the Paranormal Activity series wished it had.

The film is not perfect – the deaths are unintentionally hilarious, Mitch’s (Moses Storm) lack of response to Blaire’s text messages seems like a massive plot hole, and the final shot ruins the concept – but it serves as a good addition to the ‘teenage warning’ genre. Just like the way the beach party films of the 60s warned of the excesses of partying, and the 90s warned about the awkwardness of sex, Unfriended tackles how teenagers now communicate primarily through digital means – and all the territorial bullshit that along comes with it. Bullies, think you’ve found an expression for your hate without any kind of consequence? Think again, because as we are seeing more of in reality, what happens online doesn’t stay online.