Unfriended is the cinematic equivalent of reality television. I know I am wasting my time by watching it, I know I could be spending my time doing something productive instead, and yet there is something about it that I can not help but find intriguing. That is how I felt during all 83 minutes of the latest horror film starring stupid teenage characters that do stupid things and end up being killed in stupid ways because of it. Unfriended is about a group of friends that are being stalked online on the anniversary of a fellow student’s death. While video chatting, an unknown user invades the conversation and goes through the usual horror movie tropes in order to scare them. The user, who claims to be Laura, the believed to be dead student, says that she has dirt on every single one of the friends and will expose them for the people they are unless they play along with her games.
For the next hour and twenty minutes, it’s a pretty generic horror film with some interesting twists thrown in to how it is presented. It Follows, another recent horror film that I quite liked, felt like a throwback to the stalker horror films of the 70s. Unfriended, on the other hand, is very much set in modern times. The film is meant to look like the audience is involved so we are looking at a computer screen the whole time, from the perspective of one of the doomed friends. At first, I thought I’d find this to be a cheap gimmick that would get annoying after a while but in the end, it was surprisingly effective in bringing the feeling of it really happening.
The actors, mostly unknowns, play their roles as frightened teenagers better than most in the modern horror movie. As the film continues on, the killer begins pitting the friends against one another. The arguments and the tears that come from their backstabbing and revealing secrets feel very real. For a horror movie to be truly effective, the audience has to care about the characters and in a film like this, where most of the characters are not inherently likable, it is important to have moments like this.
Overall, the film feels like an anti-cyberbullying message hidden within a horror film. While there is nothing wrong with that, if that was the goal the filmmakers had in mind, the ending could have been a lot more powerful had it ended just one minute sooner. Instead, it ends with a cheap scare that feels like a cop out in case they want to turn it into a franchise with a new sequel every year until audiences find a new horror movie to care about.
I would not call Unfriended a great movie but it is better than most of its fellow horror films and that’s enough to give it a recommendation if you are looking for a good scare.