Well, here’s a horror film that takes place entirely on one high schooler’s MacBook screen. And it’s actually quite good.
Here’s the simple premise: Last spring at a party, Laura Barns got messy. A nasty defamatory drunk-clip got posted to YouTube, and the anonymob piled on. All this was sufficiently damning that the teen shot herself in the school parking lot. Now, on the anniversary of her death, she’s back — somehow with l337 h4x0r skillz! — to terrorize her former friends and classmates. Through Skype.
Sounds a bit hackneyed, but Unfriended actually works quite well. Watch as protagonist Blaire IMs with her boyfriend, Skypes her pals, Googles stuff, watches clips, plays music, and … gets messages from the grave! Barns’s vindictive ghost compels the friends to divulge their own damning secrets while sequentially terrorizing them.
Some allegedly spooky bits do feel a tad strained (the evil spirit greyed out a Facebook button! Now it’s messing with my Spotify!) but on the whole it’s surprisingly engaging. Or perhaps unsurprisingly — I mean, some of us pretty much live our whole lives through a computer screen these days, so the fact that a story can unfold there isn’t that strange after all. As an added bonus, Unfriended provides a decent commentary on the record-everything world we’re just now starting to live in — Russian dashcams and cop violence and all — as well as the glass-house culture of online shaming and mob justice. I kept wondering if the mystery Skype ghost was Justine Sacco, but alas. Nein.
Haus Verdict: A neat and fun take on the found-footage horror genre, updated for Generation Like. Worth a watch.
[I’m just going to leave this here. Actual page still won’t let me see the Post Comment button!]
Good Mr. Haus,
I was surprised, not having seen *Ultron* myself, that you didn’t unequivocally enjoy it. Whedon at the helm again couldn’t redeem it for you? I was tinkering with the idea of watching the original and then the sequel in due course, but you have convinced me otherwise.
As for *Young,* well, I did see that. There’s no question that it’s Baumbach’s biggest failure. (I give it the edge over *Greenberg* even though I found a lot about that film to praise.) (Also, I’m excepting *Mr. Jealousy* and *Highball* because I don’t think anyone has seen those movies, including yours truly.) The “mystery,” if one can even call it that, to which you refer in *Young* was just terribly executed. I am in love with Adam Driver’s acting, but even his doing him couldn’t distract me from the boring premise of not-old people trying to recapture or recreate a lost youth. *Wild Hogs* and *Last Vegas* are where that lazy premise belongs, not in a Baumbach feature.
All of that said, I don’t think I loathed it as much as you did. I’m curious to know why it was so cloying in your astute eyes.
It’s hard to say precisely, but it likely had something to do with the overt whole-hog hipsterism of it. VHS tapes! It’s so unabashed, and on top of it, so stupid for all the reasons you describe. Baumbach’s feeble counterculture emo mewling (emewling?) is emetic and it’s a miracle I was able to stomach my ICEE.
How did this end up on the “Unfriended” thread? 😳