Unfriended Review - Effective Skype Horror

Rating: ˜…˜…˜… The central conceit of Unfriended is so simple it could easily come across as a lazy gimmick, dreamt up just to keep costs down; playing out in real time, the film shows the computer screen of a teen as she and her friends are tormented by their long-dead €˜friend€™ over social media. Thankfully, the base idea isn't the limit of the film's creativity, instead providing just the set-up for one of the most engaging mainstream horrors in recent years. Bar some select moments where the audio is altered to increase tension, most of which work (a geiger counter tick whenever the mysterious other person types is particularly effective), the film commits to its realism, never leaving the screen or stretching its own strictly defined rules. Most of the drama plays out in an extended Skype conversation, but the action goes all round the desktop, including €˜cameos€™ from the likes of Spotify, BitTorrent and Chatroulette (complete with unwanted nudity), while each of the teens has a noticeably different level of tech-savviness. This awareness is particularly refreshing. So often films will quote the likes of Snapchat or feature Instagram without really understanding what distinct purpose they serve, but here everything's pretty genuine, which not only lends some believability to the film's crazy horrors, but also makes the characters feel a bit more than the usual slasher victim archetypes. But the best pay-off of the trick is how it helps Unfriended exercises control over a viewer's attention in a way few other slow-build horrors can match. Now, obviously, the cinematography would be, by the film's very nature, unique, but unlike other found footage films (which don€™t seem to bother hiring a DoP and just shake the camera around loads) there€™s a real methodology here; with the mouse pointer as a guide and pop-ups the equivalent of jump scares, the film manages to effortlessly leads the audience€™s attention where it wants them to go without ever feeling manipulative. This is accentuated by using a presumed familiarity with Skype, Facebook and iMessage notification sound effects as audio shorthand for various ongoing conversations, adding a bunch of new tricks to a found-footage filmmaker's toolbox.