Monday, 20 June 2016

Unfriended (2014)

"You're really sexy when you're violent..."

This surprisingly splendid film is not, to put it mildly, about the experience of 39 year old a like me who could never have experienced cyberbullying, but the premise packs a punch: a girl forced to suicide by her horrible schoolmates returns to an online afterlife to slowly punish her oppressors through guilt, dramatic revelations and horrible deaths. And the whole film is shown in real time, as the contents of one persons computer screen with Skype, YouTube and Facebook goving us the twentieth century equivalent of the epistolary novel.

That means, as you'll have guessed, that it's a low budget film, as the lack of stars indicates, but less is more; this is the rare example of a genuinely scary modern horror films. Yes, the gruesome deaths are barely glimpsed and the gore implied rather than shown, and there's a distinct lack of music video-style directing, but those are precisely the reasons why this film is so bloody good. 

Even better, the website about not answering social media messages from the dead actually exists; that's multimedia horror for you. This is a superb film, even if it does make me feel a bit old.

Young people these days, eh?

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