Unfriended may not be the scariest piece of first-person-shot candy corn out there, but it is, especially for a low-budget 82-minute Blum House entry, ingeniously constructed. It uses a premise that's almost unworkable, taking place completely within one person's computer screen and telling its story in real time via Skype, iMessage, Facebook, Spotify, and all manner of variations on the millennial self-contained social network center. Less ambitious movies tend either to fail to make this sort of thing interesting, or to cheat and take the point of view elsewhere. Give Unfriended credit: it never strays from the computer screen, and it held my interest long enough that I never felt like checking Facebook myself.
The first sequence is remarkable in its simplicity: an unseen computer user idly wanders toward a LiveLeak (read: banned from YouTube) link called "Laura Barns Suicide." Then, like every good Wikipedia user, we click through to what is labeled as the video that caused her suicide. It's aptly named "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF." We see the first few seconds--footage of the titular Laura, very drunk, talking trash about someone at a party--before a boyfriend's Skype call butts in and we're forced to pause.
This shot sets the premise for the rest of the film, which we see from the point of view of a short-attention-spanned teenager named Blaire (Shelley Hennig). The first-person storytelling is handled brilliantly as Blaire clicks back and forth among Skype conversations, instant messages, songs, websites, et cetera, which in the hands of director Leo Gabriadze never feels inauthentic. Blaire is joined remotely by boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) as well as friends Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson), as well as a mysterious seventh person who somehow butts into their Skype conversation, won't hang up, and taunts them with otherworldly threats.
It isn't particularly scary--the characters are crudely drawn and the plot is ridiculous--but it's surprisingly a lot of fun. The actors wisely play the whole thing straight; any winking at the audience would ruin the movie entirely. Rather than take an ironic position themselves, the filmmakers let the kids' ironic detachment play into the story, as we occasionally see first-person user Blaire type something honest, pause to think about it, then delete it and type "LOL."
In the end it doesn't quite come together, as the manifestation of the ghost is just too silly and the characters are just too unlikable. But there's real skill at work here: the makers of Unfriended tried something risky, and it paid off.
** 1/2 out of ****
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