Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

Directed by Stephen Susco

Viewed in Theatre

 

Summary: After grabbing a laptop from the lost and found at his workplace, Matias exposes his friends to the dark side of the internet.

 

So this is a movie I was eagerly awaiting. Going to the movies as often as I do means seeing the same trailers over and over again and this movie’s trailer was really bad. I would laugh every time it came on screen, bad. Everything about it just screamed low budget found footage horror film that was a movie where a bunch of people sit around on Skype watching ‘torture porn’ videos and reacting to them, so I did not think I was going to enjoy this movie at all. Its partially because it looked so bad that I even decided that I was going to see it, and I’m glad I did because I think I liked it.

The plot revolves around Matias, a man who recently acquired a newish laptop so that he could work more easily on a program that he is creating so that he can more easily communicate with his girlfriend, Amaya, who is deaf. He has an argument with her and then joins their friend group on Skype where they do periodic game nights when they cannot meet up in person. Over the course of the night it is revealed, after they discoveri a trove of disturbing videos on the laptop,  that Matias stole this laptop from a group of dangerous group of people from the dark web who are very keen on getting it back and don’t care who they hurt in the process. In order to accomplish this goal they make everyone stay on the call, forbid any outside contact and put more and more pressure on the group to get them to give in. Now that isn’t exactly where the plot ends as there are some twists and turns but without getting too spoilery that is the basics of what happens.

 

This isn’t a particularly gripping plot and there are many problems that start to arise, particularly when the hacking and dark web aspects of the movie start getting brought up and discussed. I don’t know much about hacking or the dark web but they’re presented in the movie as these magical things that can do anything at any time and it occasionally gets a bit silly as to what we are shown they can do. I’ll cut this part of the movie a bit of slack though because I genuinely don’t know if they would or would not in reality be able to accomplish some of the things they did with hacking.

 

Where the movie really shines though are the points of style and character. I didn’t see the first Unfriended so I can’t comment on how well it worked in that movie but I kind of enjoyed the gimmick of ‘everything happens on a screen’. It is a unique way to tell a story like this that is so dependant on computers and I found it genuinely engaging and relatable to just see someone realistically use a computer in a movie. I know that is a low bar but hey, I’m sharing any small positive I can think of. My favorite part of the movie though was definitely the characters. I genuinely liked Matias and could relate to the series of dumb decisions he makes while trying to reconcile with Amaya and fix everything he’s messed up. All the things he does in the movie make sense in the context of what is going on and his reactions feel natural and understandable, even if they aren’t always the most intelligent decisions. I felt pretty much the same way about Amaya, and the two of them create a solid emotional core for the movie to hang on. All the other characters have their quirks and personalities but none rise to the same level of character complexity as Matias and Amaya. The only exception to this would one character, AJ, who runs a conspiracy theory youtube channel and tends to go on bizarre rants. And what is strange about this character is that no one from the friend group seem to like him very much, but they never explain why they hang out with him or if he changed and wasn’t like this before or anything along those lines. I know this occasionally happens where one person in a friend group is not loved but more tolerated by some members of said group but it could have been a bit more clear as to what the background for this group was. The other characters are more or less fine, perfectly serviceable folk to be brought along for the ride in this horror story.

 

Another aspect of the movie that surprised me was the quality of the pacing and the atmosphere. The pacing was excellent and the movie never dragged, which was my biggest concern going into it. But the real star of the movie was the atmosphere that it managed to create. I had thought that the ‘everything happens on a screen gimmick’ would torpedo this movie but it actually helped build this sense of oppressive claustrophobia to what was happening. I don’t think the movie ever got into actually being scary territory, but they were kind of close to achieving what they set out to do. It helps that most of the movie is not them watching the videos that they find but instead trying to figure out what to do about the situation they have gotten into. For what it is worth though, the videos, which mainly depict young women in distress and are heavily implied to be snuff films, are genuinely creepy and do add a bit of grindhouse feel to what is going on.

 

Now that we have the positives out of the way, let’s explore what did not work, the story. The plot is AWFUL. The premise where a guy takes a laptop from a lost and found and then finds weird things on it that reveal a dark side to the internet to him. But then the plot loses itself completely and becomes about this group of omnipotent hackers on the dark web that is just so awful and hackneyed and straight out of an early 1990s ‘hackers are a thing maybe, go make a movie about them!’ movie. These people can do anything so any of the actions taken by the protagonists never really end up mattering, and that can work for some kinds of movies, like an existential horror or maybe some kind of cosmic horror, but it just feels really unearned here. What is especially bad is that whenever a ‘dark web’ person is on screen the shot becomes dark and distorted and staticy all around them. I know why it is there in the film, it’s there to make sure you know who the bad guys are and to keep you kind of in the dark about what they look like or how many of them there are, but it just looks ridiculous.

 

Usually I only want to write these reviews if I see a movie that elicits a strong positive or negative response from me, so it feels very strange to write this much about a movie and then say, “Eh, it was fine.” But that is where I stand on this particular film. Unfriended: Dark Web isn’t the disaster I thought it was going to be, but it also couldn’t really transcend the limitations that it has being a smaller budget movie that entirely takes place on device screens. I like found footage movies so I think I may be a bit less harsh than some critics who have reviewed this, but what I’m really curious about is whether the group of twelve year olds behind me liked it or not. Realizing that there were kids watching this was probably the scariest part of the movie.

Very mild recommendation for this one.