June 21: Unfriended

[kinetic_elaboration]

I watched Unfriended yesterday for pretty much no reason other than I wanted to watch something that would be fairly easy to consume and probably not terribly good. And it was fine, I would say better than the expectations I set for it. I caught an error pretty early on--a text chat that looked different when seen at different times, which I'm pretty sure was not on purpose--but for the most part it was immersive and unusual. I feel like found footage (and variants like this) get such a bad wrap but, I don't know, I usually end up liking them.

There is something to be said about the format of the film being distracting, though. Definitely the crutch upon which an otherwise weak narrative could hold itself up. I was way more interested in the how of the story than the what, and by the end, I felt like I'd really learned the bare minimum on most of the characters: they're all pretty terrible people and that's that on that I guess! The solutions to the mysteries and the twists were all fairly predictable and though there were hints at hidden depths to some of the people, those hints never really went anywhere. Again, because that wasn't really the point, was it?

That said, I did like the concept of the haunted computer/haunted internet and I'm going to forgive a lot in its honor. And I thought the movie was pretty creative with the details of that haunting: not just the extra person on the Skype chat but the manipulated search results, the inability to use certain buttons, the uncontrollable music. A laptop with all of its screens and tabs and programs is an overwhelming sensory place and a mysterious place in a lot of ways, so why couldn't something just... get in there, and when there, take full advantage of that complex landscape? Very Grabinski-coded.

I was full on convinced by the end of the film that the chats with the boyfriend weren't real. There was something suspicious about that conversation from the get. I felt very much like he was manipulating her to think of the ghost as real, and that what he said in the chat felt really disconnected from what he said over the video. And there's really no reason to think, based on what we know of the 'rules' of this scenario, that Laura can't do something like that. I mean she is mostly speaking from her own accounts, but she takes over the 911 call and she posts Val's photos from others' accounts. So--why can't she be in the one-on-one chat? Anyway, I think I'm objectively correct about this but in an unsubtle movie, I expected there'd be some explicit confirmation on that point. Oh well.

This film was also soooooo 2013. I saw the tumblr log in lol. And of course that they were on Skype at all, a platform that no longer exists. I liked that about it, though. It's like a little horror time capsule.