If the idea of spending 80 minutes looking at nothing but the screen of a teenage girl's computer doesn't terrify you or make you feel creepy, you might actually enjoy bits and pieces of UNFRIENDED (formerly titled CYBERNATURAL), the latest from Blumhouse Productions and, oddly enough, producer Timur Bekmambetov. Not unlike last year's more ambitious and interesting OPEN WINDOWS, UNFRIENDED carries out the beats of a horror movie shown only from the vantage point of one girl's laptop, with little cheats built in. Keep in mind that a person can Skype with several people at once, or play YouTube videos to give us visual film clips that act as flashbacks, or receive messages via any number of social media outlets that can serve as unspoken dialogue.
Our lead character also investigates the possibility that the ghost of a recently dead friend is terrorizing her and her pals by going onto websites and message boards about such phenomena, all the while getting vaguely threatening messages from someone who may or not be dead. I'll admit, director Levan Gabriadze (LUCKY TROUBLE) and screenwriter Nelson Greaves actually make this exercise rather amusing and clever, although not especially scary. The kids on the Skype call are picked off one by one, supposedly by the ghost of their friend who killed herself after she was cyber-bullied when a humiliating video of her is posted by persons unknown.
Although younger audiences may recognize some of the young players in UNFRIENDED, they were fairly interchangeable as far as I was concerned. I was pleasantly surprised to see FAT KID RULES THE WORLD and PITCH PERFECT actor Jacob Wysocki on hand as one of the kids/victims. There's nothing inherently bad about the performances, but no one really stands out as being memorable or standing apart from the rest. And maybe that's not a bad thing. It certainly adds to the air of realism that these kids are just random, everyday teens and not the most popular kids in school.
UNFRIENDED has its flaws, but it moves like the dickens, and has a few fun and smart ideas for telling a story from such an unusual vantage point. For those of you sick of found-footage horror films, this is not that. This one unspools itself in real time and does some interesting things with the way movies tell stories. Horror fans that want to try on something different might have fun with it.
