Unfriended (2014)

A girl who was a jerk herself was made the victim of cyber bullying by her class mates. A video was posted on line of her drunk and passed out after she crapped her pants. This along with the vocal outburst on facebook telling her to kill herself indeed lead her to suicide. A year later a group of friends all log into their computers and video chat with each other on the anniversary of her death. Each of those 5 played some sort of role in her death, this movie is about finding out what that role was.

This was a very unique movie. The entire thing is from the perspective of a single characters computer screen. We see nothing else the entire film but her computer. The characters all interact through video chat, instant messaging, and facebook. They never actually interact with each other directly in any way. It was oddly uncomfortable at first. I kept wanting to close the various windows and open programs she had. It really felt like I was watching it all unfold with them, and I was impressed with how well the gimmick worked over all. It also allowed them to use a lot of cool little tricks. The villain was able to hack their way into their calls and even message them through facebook using the dead girls account. It was able to directly manipulate the computer as well and would for example turn on a specific song on spotify to mess with its victom. The way they used the computer was fantastic and creative.

I liked the various characters as well. They were rather believable high school teens and seemed fairly normal in the beginning. As the movie went on and they started to get picked off we learned more about them. They all had issues and by the end of the film I rather liked a few of the various roles. They were interesting yet not to over the top. The actors did fine with what they were given, though none of the performances were really memorable.

The effects are hard to judge on this one. Because it was all done with video chat, the picture was never overly clear. We are dealing with web cams so it was grainy and often had distortion on it. So the killings while somewhat violent, were lessened by what we were actually shown. I think it was a smart idea, and it kept to the computer screen theme they had going on. But it did lesson the potential effect of each kill. Some of the kills were rather creative though, and I really liked how they handled them. One we get to see the police respond and hear the officers in the background. One was done in a very quick manor with the build up making you think something else was happening entirely. It was a very creative movie, and while not scary, I enjoyed what it was doing.

The ending was decent, and I enjoyed finding out each kids secret and seeing whether they were innocent or guilty. The social media aspect was on point, and seeing the villain posting stuff about each kid was amusing. People would instantly jump on the bandwagon and start shaming the others for something that they would normally enjoy seeing simply because of the context in which it was posted. They did a good job of showing how social media works and why it can be a negative thing.

A nice fun movie which starts off a little slow. Stick with it, it does get better and I loved the computer screen gimmick. A good rental, though I would not buy it.