Unfriended 
A group of teens get together on Skype on the anniversary of a friend’s suicide. However, things take a dark turn when someone claiming to be the dead friend shows up on the conversation, while leaking a few dirty secrets too. Shot from the perspective of one teen’s laptop, the screen constantly switches from Skype to Facebook to Google to YouTube as they try to deal with the malevolent force. It’s the future of cinema, everybody.
As easy as it would be to dismiss the found-footage genre, there are a few gems in there. Films like
.REC and
Troll Hunter sort of make up for dreck like
The Devil Inside,
Apollo 18,
Paranormal Activity and
Area 51. This leads us to the unfortunate situation that we can’t automatically write off any new film from this genre as it may turn out to be quite good. Which brings us to
Unfriended.
Unfriended is not a brilliant film. It’s not a great film either. And I’d be hesitant in calling it a good film too. But, it is not a lazy film. A lot of these found-footage films are often the result of bland filmmakers trying to make a quick cynical buck but,
Unfriended shows genuine effort. A lot of research was put into social media and its pitfalls, as well as using internet technology to tell its story at a reasonable pace. There were many times where I caught myself saying “wow, that was pretty clever.”
But,
Unfriended is greatly let down by its silly, generic script. Any terror is diffused when you remember that the villain is a ghost using Facebook from beyond the grave. I found myself laughing a lot throughout (the blender scene is a laugh riot). Had the film dropped the ghost angle and maybe focused on how social media plus irrational anger can destroy lives, this could have a neat little horror film.
Unfriended suffers mostly from the same reason video-game adaptations fail – they lack that interactivity that keeps the player / user engaged enough to continue. Maybe if it had been an interactive web-series like the
Marble Hornet series, it might have done a better job at telling its ghost-hacker tale.
Even though I consider
Unfriended to be a failure, I still recommend checking it out at least once. There is some really good stuff in here, and it’s borderline intelligent at times. But, its strict adherence to the teen-horror formula will probably have you logging off.