Unfriended Films (Leo Gabriadze/Stephen Susco, 2015/2018)

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cdnchris
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Re: Unfriended Films (Leo Gabriadze/Stephen Susco, 2015/2018)

#26 Post by cdnchris » Mon Jul 16, 2018 11:31 am

I still prefer the
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They all did it ending.

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colinr0380
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Re: Unfriended Films (Leo Gabriadze/Stephen Susco, 2015/2018)

#27 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Dec 30, 2018 7:19 am

The Skype call is coming from inside the house!!!

Well I finally caught the first Unfriended film last night on television, which might not have been the best way to see it, as the verite atmosphere gets rather destroyed when you have a few minutes of adverts every couple of scenes! Although an inappropriate pop up advert at the worst possible time turns up in the film itself!

I liked the film with one major reservation. I loved the emphasis placed on 'real world' technology and the attempt to ensure that everything played out through actual internet progammes, and agree with Emak-Bakia's comment that this is a film that is only going to get more valuable in the future as a vision of mid 2010s online space. I really like the idea of 'real time horror through technology' and this aside from the brief moment at the end (Which I'm fine with, since the whole film is about the online space bleeding into 'reality' and having real world consequences. What is worse, being jumped by an actual ghost at the end, or having your role in bullying exposed to everyone on Facebook as your final act?) is really the only film I can think of that does not have an undermining jump away from its structure for an outside viewpoint. I love the faux documentary structure of The Last Broadcast, and also the Skype chat of the Joe Swanberg short The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger in the V/H/S anthology (though it being a Skype call rather than VHS made it completely unsuitable to be in that anthology in my opinion! [-( ), but both of those end up doing that leap outside of the confines of their medium at the end, which is rather unsatisfying. Unfriended to its credit does not really do that until the very last moment.

The major reservation is that its an I Know What You Did Last Summer style of horror film, in that the group of kids that we are following have to have done something so horrible that they have driven somebody to suicide, and then we are left with these obnoxious loudmouth characters treating each other like crap and tearing themselves apart, fundamentally undermining their own decency as events progress and secrets are revealed, such that it becomes rather impossible to actually care about any of them. I think I mentioned this in the thread for Terror Train as well, but I'm not really a fan of 'pranks gone wrong' films because there is often nobody but the final girl to identify with and often not even her, because she is tainted by association with the original crime and at the very least for continuing to hang around the same bunch of idiots for some time afterwards as well! Also in these situations I have the feeling that you don't need a masked killer or ghostly demon to actively be going about murdering this band of reprobates, as their relationships were in the process of self destructing anyway. Just leave them alone and they'll do more damage to each other than any ghostly reckoning with their past misdeeds would ever do!

The other problem is that there is no real developing dialogue in this film, just people screaming at each other in rage in response to some posted piece of incriminating information. That works in some way to show the lack of agency of the characters and their antagonisms with each other, and the sense of meandering improvisation to the playing feels appropriate to the verisimilitude of the situation, but boy did it get aggravating! This film makes the bickering characters in The Blair Witch Project seem calm and collected with clear and focused goals in comparison! The characters in Unfriended are so annoying that I could not wait for them to get possessed and throw themselves into blenders, and so on! Although I did like the idea that because all of the characters were physically separate there is no actual physical comfort that they can provide to one another. Maybe a few more passes on the script could have highlighted more the way that the characters only have the way that they use their voices and the content of their words to calm or antagonise a situation, and often are failing at doing so as words seem empty in the face of the recorded and broadcast evidence of past actions being thrown at them. Words and deeds have been split apart much as the online and offline worlds are being treated as separate entities, when they are really related together.

However despite really not liking any of the characters at all I really do love the use of technology here, especially the way that the film uses multiple variations on an instant message being deleted and re-typed before being sent to show thought processes and fears not aired, as well as to provide the audience with extra information:
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He didn't do anything I promise...He didn't do anything...i...It was him
Or the way that we are left to note the greater number of dislikes than likes on the bullying video, so really the initial prank was not much of a roaring success anyway (There is something really savvy about the bullying video being on YouTube whilst the suicide video is on the more 'mondo' LiveLeaks site). And while it is starting to become as much of a cliche as rolling bars of static were in the VHS era, I really like the way the film uses stuttering and breaking apart digital images (or buffering YouTube videos, or IM messages hidden behind other screens (which obviously could not happen these days with snap-to windows on Windows 10!), or forwarded images with slow downloading bars, or dropped internet connections) to create suspense, and it also plays into the way that the film tackles the 'dead space' of the digital realm, with the stuttering video images often turning certain screens seemingly static and the only way to tell that the entire film is not paused is to contrast that with other screens. You need an actual consciousness to keep the windows moving, the messages coming, to fill the video windows of the Skype chat boxes otherwise you are just left with an image of an empty room. And I like the way that aspect of freezing and suddenly the image moving again is the novel explanation used to justify the standard jump scare moments.

That made the film worthwhile to me especially when it became more obvious that we were seeing things as much through the eyes of the ghost as the final girl, which became quite amusing when the ghost takes control of the Spotify playlist (and thereby the soundtrack) to provide some ironic counterpointing! It kind of furthers ideas in Pulse too, with its sense of the electronic and ghostly realm being connected somehow, as a person lives on in their deeds even after death, mixed with new ideas of forceful online memorialisation (casual or meaningful, all get reduced to a 'like') and someone who definitely does not want to exorcise their 'right to be forgotten' in the digital realm in exchange for the right to revenge! As well as the sense that in an era of doxing people are rather wrongheaded to expect personal information to stay within a small group when a misclick or one share suddenly makes everything publicly available and you can watch their meltdown in real time.

One thing that I was perhaps hoping for that did not really come to pass (maybe in the sequel?) was the idea that one of the characters was actually hoaxing the others, especially in that final scene jumping around the world and trying to get a stranger on the Chatroulette site to call the police to their address, which had me thinking of all of those situations of livestreamers getting Swatted by people in their chatrooms. I could see that aspect being made into a bigger thing in any future film.

Anyway, I don't really come away from this scared about the notions of my privacy being invaded by the internet, more a bizarrely strange kind of hope for the internet being a place where people are unable to be horrible to each other without having their actions called out in some fashion, even if it takes a ghost to do it!

(Plus I have to admit to liking the implied notion that 'old fashioned' internet forums are the equivalents of musty old bookshops or libraries of modern horror films, where the characters have to go to get the more reliable source of information on ghostly events!)

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