Director
Levan Gabriadze
Cast:
Heather Sossaman
Matthew Bohrer
Courtney Halverson
Shelley Hennig
Moses Jacob Storm
Will Peltz
Renee Olstead
Rated: R
A group of high school friends decide to hang out on a Skype chat in “Unfriended,” a movie that completely takes place on a computer screen. It seems like a fairly average night for the group until an unidentified person joins their Skype chat.
The group soon begins to believe that the unidentified person is actually their friend who committed suicide after a series of extreme cyber bullying.
“Unfriended” is a unique, fresh and innovative way to make a low budget horror film. The movie is told only through online tools that many of us use in our daily lives, including Skype, Facebook, message boards, iTunes, and more. It separates the movie from other films in the genre and makes for an interesting experience… For a while.
The tactic of using the technology to make the film is fine at first, but as the picture kept going, this style began to get repetitive and it had me watch-checking at certain moments.
The story was fairly average for the most part, too. As some of the characters started to turn on each other, the movie did have a sort of “Twilight Zone” feel to it, however, the film still can’t escape its “group of friends die off one by one” plot thread.
Most of all, the movie just isn’t very scary. The use of social media and Skype was interesting and there were a few creepy moments. But it wasn’t enough.
The acting in the movie is very hit or miss. For example, Shelley Hennig, who played Blaire, was fairly convincing in the role but that wasn’t the case for the rest of the cast. Some of the characters were a bit annoying, too, offering nothing more than a lot of yelling and screaming.
“Unfriended is an interesting and innovative take on horror and it has some good moments. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for the movie as a whole, the story at its core is still pretty simple, the acting isn’t anything special and the filmmaking style starts to drag after a while. It’s something to watch on home video, but it’s not worth seeing on the big screen. 2 out of 5.
Matthew Liedke on Film 