The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #99: MOCKINGBIRD (2014)

100. THE NIGHTMARE (2015)
99. MOCKINGBIRD (2014)



Bryan Bertino's 2008 surprise hit The Strangers was so expertly made (and by a first-time director who learned the craft pretty much on the fly, no less) that it was easy to forget how fairly shallow it was. Though it had moments where Bertino's talent for tension transcended the need for extraneous things like plot and character, there was really nothing left in the end but an empty scream. Some characters survived, some didn't, and so what?

Bertino has come into his own since then, with the well-received character drama/fairytale horror film The Monster in 2016, which featured a career-defining performance from Zoe Kazan. But he made a movie in between, which BlumHouse released directly to streaming without any fanfare, called Mockingbird, and it's not only one of the best horror films of the decade, but a pointed deconstruction of the found footage genre in particular.

The opening title reads "Once upon a time in 1995." Before social media, before cell phones became ubiquitous, before the world turned into a general panopticon where everyone's lives have been more or less documented at every moment. This is important to the story.

The movie is told through three separate parallel narratives, defined by titles as "The Woman," "The Family," and "The Clown." Each is sent a video camera in the mail along with a message of "Congratulations!" and instructions to record themselves. The cameras are already recording and streaming the footage. Just what they've won is unclear, but the victory is not unexpected; all parties make a vague reference to having signed up for a contest at the mall. All are excited to participate in whatever they've just won: after all, they're stars now.

Then the Woman and the Family receive a message demanding that they never stop filming themselves, with a videotape that brutally displays the consequences of disobeying. The Clown gets no threat or demand, but receives a series of increasingly ridiculous instructions which he enthusiastically follows, to the point of embarrassment and self-harm.

Mockingbird was written by Bertino from a story he created along with Sam Esmail, who since has rocketed to auteur status with the brilliant series Mr. Robot, which just wrapped up its four-season run on USA. I don't know exactly what Esmail's contribution here was, but what it shares with his other flagship work is a caution about the fragility of privacy. The characters are completely cavalier about the personal information they give away, in the name of simply performing in a proto-version of a reality TV show or social media. In signing up for the "contest," they've unwittingly signed their lives away. Anyone who's skeptical about this should recite for me any line from Apple terms and conditions.

The movie crosscuts until the three storylines inevitably meet, in an ending that seems contrived because it is. The orchestrators of the "contest" are making their own horror film with unwitting subjects, and they essentially script it without scripting it, similar to any reality TV show. (They even place record players throughout the houses they stalk to score their scenes with foreboding music.) I won't reveal who the orchestrators turn out to be, but it's worth noting that Bertino and Esmail realize that young people have mastered technology that older generations still treat as novel. Just look at the number of baby boomers taken in by Trump bluster, Q conspiracies, and online scams. In the end, "reality" can be scripted as easily as fiction can. Maybe easier.