‘Unfriended: Dark Web’ Is One of the Best Horror Movies of the Summer
With ‘Hereditary’ still complicating mother-child relationships everywhere, Blumhouse drops the sequel to their 2015 cult hit, ‘Unfriended.’ And ‘Dark Web’ sees ‘Unfriended’ emerge as a surprisingly vital, totally terrifying, very contemporary horror franchise.
Here’s a weird coincidence: Bodied and Unfriended: Dark Web, the two American movies that come the closest to capturing the overstimulated craziness of being alive and online in 2018 both feature sight gags involving laptops and Bernie Sanders.
Audiences won’t get to see Bodied’s scene until its distributor, YouTube Red, figures out how to best unleash director Joseph Kahn’s legitimately Swiftian (Jonathan, not Taylor), Eminem-meets-identity-politics comedy to every corner of the Internet. (The movie, which premiered last year at TIFF, is like a feature-length viral video waiting to happen, and could finally be a think-piece generator to crash the pseudo-intellectual dark web for good). In Kahn’s seriocomic semiotics lesson, a Sanders sticker slapped on a battle rapper’s MacBook becomes an emblem of virtual virtue signaling masking IRL racism. In Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web, which opens this weekend, the owner of a stolen computer tries to log in by using “FeeltheBern2020” as a password before deducing that the actual cypher is much more ambiguous: Nothing more—or less—than a question mark.
This ambivalent bit of punctuation is the right symbol for a film that’s not easy to appraise in terms of horror movie or allegory, but maybe deserves credit for trying to be both. Arriving in 2015, before the term “elevated horror” entered our lives, the original Unfriended was cheap multiplex teen-bait packaged inside a brilliant, of-the-moment formalism. By confining its action entirely to the space of a single computer screen but filling its digital canvas with multiple planes of sound, image, and action, it mounted the most ingenious variation on the found-footage gimmick since Paranormal Activity. Through a combination of innovative staging and a clever, perfectly timed interplay between webcams and chat windows (with the cast set up in multiple locations and supposedly running through the whole film in a single take, like a stage play) the 13-by-9 backdrop became a kind of intimately epic canvas. The onscreen pileup of recognizable programs and websites (Skype, Google, Spotify, etc.) gives the scenario a necessary dose of brand-name authenticity.
Unfriended’s seamless virtual mise-en-scène was an artistic achievement in its own right. (I’ve thought about double billing it with Olivier Assayas’s more serene art-house terror-of-texting thriller Personal Shopper, which I’m not sure is actually smarter or superior). It was also smartly deployed in the service of its subject matter, a contemporary parable about social-media bullying gone awry. The story of video-chatting teenagers being surveilled—and then systematically murdered—by the vengeful spirit of a classmate who killed herself after an unflattering video being posted online drew on the technophobic, ghost-in-the-machine metaphysics of modern Japanese horror classics like Ringu and Pulse. But the most interesting thing about the original was its sense of complicity and retribution. However horrible their comeuppances (including a death-by-blender that was one of the best genre gross-outs in recent memory), the film’s characters—all vain, duplicitous, envious teenage sinners—were really just getting what was coming to them: For all its state-of-the-art textures, Unfriended was an old-fashioned morality play.
Dark Web, which features an identical visual style but has no narrative connection to the events of the previous movie, rotates things 180 degrees by focusing on a group of innocents. With this in mind, it might seem a bit cynical—in a politically correct sense—that the unsuspecting Skypers here comprise such an obviously racially, sexually, and ideologically diverse group. In addition to nominal white beta male hero Matias (Colin Woodell), whose possession of the aforementioned stolen laptop sets things in motion, there’s Matias’s hearing-impaired Puerto Rican girlfriend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras); interracial lesbian couple Serena (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Nari (Get Out’s Betty Gabriel); Indonesian American DJ Lexx (Savira Windyani); and anti-corporate conspiracy theorist AJ (Connor Del Rio). These aren’t blithe high schoolers hoarding secrets and lies; they’re cool, progressive, urban 20-somethings. They like Bernie Sanders. They don’t deserve to get hurt.
Which, of course, is exactly what the filmmakers are banking on. With apologies to Unforgiven (which comes immediately alphabetically before Unfriended on any discerning cinephile’s DVD shelf), “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” I don’t want to spoil Dark Web too badly here, but I will reveal that the supernatural threat of the original has been somewhat supplanted by a more secular set of antagonists: a cabal of snuff video enthusiasts who earn bragging rights and Bitcoins by staging the sickest possible scenarios with abducted co-eds. (When Wikipedia is used in this movie, it’s to define “trephination”).
By impulsively (and unknowingly) retrieving one of these mercenary sociopaths’ laptop from a cyber cafe lost and found (an unlikely setup, but just go with it), Colin opens himself and his friends up to the same kind of danger depicted in the original, but the villains’ motives are more mercenary and self-preserving this time around, and the cautionary tale signifies differently. In Unfriended, technology became a vessel for ice-cold revenge; in … Dark Web it’s a vehicle for surveillance and exploitation.
I guess what I’m saying is that from its reality-referencing subtitle on down, … Dark Web is a more political movie than its predecessor, which filtered the perils of living life as Extremely Online Guys and Girls through the rituals of personal grievance. Instead of examining how misplaced texts can destroy and disfigure friendships, Dark Web spreads its net wider, critiquing a capitalist mindset that, taken to its logical extreme, sells suffering to the highest bidder. Put another way: If Unfriended was a 21st century version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the sequel channels Hostel.
Dark Web’s mouthpiece is A.J., whose (ironically Internet-fueled) skepticism about social media as a means of commodification (“we are the product,” he warns) is vindicated in an extreme way. A.J.’s rants are either inspiring or annoying (or maybe both at once), but they tie back to the basically humane idea that we’re supposed to identify with these characters and empathize with their frustrations, even before they’re being hunted by hoodie-wearing kidnappers. Serena and Nari want to get married despite family resistance; Matias and Amaya’s ongoing, emotionally-charged relationship problems—he’s building an app to help her understand him better during video chats, whereas she just wants him to take a sign language class—are taken surprisingly seriously even as they clearly underscore themes of communication breakdown and overload.
The actors are all terrifically naturalistic (somebody get Betty Gabriel a lead role soon, please), and while the script sags under the weight of exposition, it’s witty around the edges, nodding to both geek and Greek mythology (including a great mispronunciation of “Styx” by a character who obviously hasn’t listened to “Mr. Roboto”). The film also gets great comic mileage out of the group’s attempt to play Cards Against Humanity in the midst of incredible, life-or-death stress. In fact, I’d say the filmmakers deserve a medal for making CAH seem like the miserable hipster ordeal that it is.
As in the first Unfriended, the absolute authenticity of the MacBook aesthetic will prompt an almost subliminal anxiety in certain susceptible viewers—i.e., anybody who isn’t a total Luddite. Forget the identification with family trauma that makes Hereditary so intense; it’s hard to watch programs loading slowly without involuntarily twitching your own fingers to double click the issues away, or to see incoming-text ellipsis disappear without yielding a message, an effect which turns the viewer into the ghosted party. I’m typing with multiple browsers open and an iTunes playlist on shuffle, and it feels like I’m watching a particularly boring deleted scene from the movie I’m reviewing.
Future scholars will surely have a lot to say about the Unfriended movies from a phenomenological point of view (they’re going to be dissertation fodder, and that’s not meant as a diss). But while Dark Web is intense and clever and absorbing, it really isn’t all that scary, which could be a bug rather than a feature in the summer of Hereditary (which has it significantly out-jolted).
Aside from the skilfully-realized, Haneke-esque creepiness of the cached (or should I say Caché’d?) videos Matias finds on his new acquisition’s hard drive, the terror here is largely conceptual, more in line with the paranoid, every-breath-you-take thrillers of the early 1970s than the grim, creeping catharsis of J-horror. One important late twist even recalls The Parallax View, a film with a fade-out that was, at the time, the apex of Watergate-era fatalism. “There will be no questions” goes the final line of Alan J. Pakula’s classic. Dark Web also tries to have the last word on its era, but as it’s being released Clue-style with two different endings—only one of which I’ve seen—it’s hard to take its conclusions too seriously. Does finding out that a movie has two climaxes suggest a subtle, multi-faceted approach to its subject, or is it just a gimmick? All I’ve got on this one is a question mark.