“Take that shirt off, take that shirt off,” pleads Mitch (Moses Storm). “Make me,” coos his girlfriend, Blaire (Shelley Hennig). You see both their faces, close up, as they peer into their Skype screens. Mitch — or Mitchie, as Blaire has deemed him in her address book — pulls out a large shiny blade. Her eyes go wide, she smiles and says, “You’re adorable and really sexy when you’re violent.”
Okay. So you’re inside a horror movie with teens who like to play this way, kids who will be in trouble because of sex, kids who have no idea what’s coming, even if you do know, because you’ve seen this movie more than a few times. But if the plot of Unfriended is too familiar, its trick is at least sort of new, a step off from the found footage trend that’s dominated low-budget scary movie making at least since Blair Witch — or, more precisely, it’s a step in.
Most movies using the found footage conceit focus on the footage itself, with handheld shots and harrowing close-ups of frightened faces, suggesting where cameras turn off or oscillating fansas to indicate that some of the footage-makers are more clever than others. Unfriended goes in another direction, borrowing something else entirely from Blair Witch.
Specifically, it borrows from the memorably brilliant internet campaign, using the fundamental interface of Blaire’s screen as your only access to what’s happening. This screen, of course, offers many types of images and apps, the narrative condensed to bits of Skype, Spotify, and Facebook, instant messaging, and Google searching. That these can appear more or less simultaneously makes the action seem to occur quickly: Blaire and Mitch’s flirtation – that is, her unbuttoning her shirt – is interrupted by a group Skype, including not only their usual friends but also an unknown interloper, whose blank person icon becomes instantly horrifying.
As the friends ponder what to do or who might be messing with them, Blaire and Mitch exchange messages in which he suggests what you know he must: maybe it’s “a ghost”. You know this is coming because you’ve also seen what Blaire was looking at before all this started, before Mitch started being so adorably violent, namely, a YouTube upload showing the ghastly gunshot suicide of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman).
The backstory for this event – and yes, it occurred exactly one year ago – becomes Unfriended‘s plot. Each of the Skypers reveals, however reluctantly, his or her part in the bullying and other abuse that led Laura to kill herself. No surprise, much of this abuse is documented and uploaded to YouTube, so that Blaire’s screen can show you what happened, how Laura was humiliate,d or what sexual violence was committed against her.
As regular as all this might sound, Unfriended does raise a few good questions about how social media works, how it is used, and how it shapes our experience. Most obviously, the MacBook screen-as-movie-screen points out, experience can be limited by dependence on social media as a means of communication.
Those limits turn increasingly abstract and also more vivid as you observe what’s communicated, whether professions of loyalty and love, denials of responsibility, or accusations. Jess (Renee Olstead) starts recalling a history of nasty actions by Val (Courtney Halverson), a sexual encounter between Adam (Will Peltz) and one of the girls was “an accident” (they were, of course, drunk), and Ken (Jacob Wysocki) starts showing off the blender with which he makes margaritas while pulling on his bong.
Laura manages these interactions by typing, insisting that no one hang up, that all “play a game”. She’s also visible in recordings. That all events are recorded poses another question. Whatever friends are telling one another, whether they’re confessing, lying outright, misremembering, or trying to massage a difficult truth, they place a certain value on documentation, while also trivializing it, sharing lies, truths, and terrible pictures with everyone on the planet. As private moment and performance, or maybe self and act, become indistinguishable, Unfriended asks (and can’t possibly answer) how this culture of over-sharing can be understood, how it matters.
Most obviously, it matters because on-screen events both reflect and produce off-screen events, recent gone-viral recordings of police abuses being only one category of such overlap. At the same time, there are ways in which such over-sharing might not matter. No matter what you think you’re sharing or not sharing, all data, including images, is completely un-private, so accessible to everyone, including the NSA.
In this context, Unfriended is extra-timely. Yes, per the formula, it shows that these kids’ excesses lead to the same results suffered by other kids in other horror movies. But there’s also something specific about the logistics of excess in Unfriended. This has to do with the movie’s title, as “friend”, noun and verb, no longer means what it might have meant before Facebook. It also has to do with its format, the screen that signifies limits and excess, too little and too much. This is the perfect format for how movies are consumed now, on phones and tablets. As it replicates a viewing experience, it also becomes one. So, you might consider another question: what do you mean by ‘excess’?