UNFRIENDED

UNFRIENDED (vt, CYBERNATURAL [original title]). Levan Gabriadze (as Leo Gabriadze), dir. Nelson Greaves, script, producer. Russia, USA, Poland, Germany, Puerto Rico (filmed, Santa Clarita, CA): Bazelevs Production, Blumhouse Productions (prod.) / Universal Pictures (US dist.), 2014/2015.

Adequately summarized by Anonymous on IMDb, using original title: "While video chatting one night, six high school friends receive a Skype message from a classmate who killed herself exactly one year ago. At first they think it's a prank, but when the girl starts revealing the friends' darkest secrets, they realize they are dealing with something out of this world, something that wants them dead. Told entirely from a young girl's computer desktop" — older girl, actually, about to graduate high school — "CYBERNATURAL redefines 'found footage' for a new generation of teens." Peter Debruge in his brief but insightful Variety review notes that "For the record, 'Cybernatural' isn’t the first film to take place entirely within a computer screen. Two Ryerson film school students, Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg, became the talk of Toronto last year with their clever short 'Noah,' and this year’s Fantasia program also includes “Open Windows,” an ambitious Spanish chiller that features Elijah Wood at the mercy of a cybervillain."

UNFRIENDED is significant to start with for having an estimated production budget of US$1M and a worldwide gross after under three weeks of wide distribution of close to US$33M, with a MOVIEmeter rating for the same period of 24, indicating, among the sort of people who use the Internet Movie Database, intense interest in the film.

The film's interest esthetically and for the Clockworks Wiki is indicated in the original title of CYBERNATURAL: the film's "naturalizing" of apparently supernatural Horror into the world of the web, for much of the film embodying Tzvetan Todorov's idea of "the fantastic" as our suspension between sensing something as uncanny or having a natural explanation. The plot of the film is "Ten Little Indians" in the subgenre that Debruge follows Roger Ebert as identifying as "the Dead Teenager Movie": a story of ghostly revenge against six, in this case, teens. But the Ghost in the Machine wreaks its revenge through that most postmodern of devices, the web as incarnated on a Macintosh computer of some sort, and the takeover of the machine is chillingly similar to ordinary glitches and sophisticated hacking, where a computer user is "trapped" on a page, making cyberspace horrifically claustrophobic. Also of note, if we conclude UNFRIENDED is indeed a tale of ghostly revenge, the screen of the computer becomes a kind of portal in the supernatural.

Note also variation on the motif of surveillance, where the Ghost not only has her ghostly sources but can take advantage of the built-in dangers of unwanted surveillance by computer cameras and revelations from teens dumb enough to do bad things and record their actions.

Erlich, 05/V/15